RBR50 Factory Reset does not work!

I have an Actiontec T3200 provided by my ISP, and I have been having some performance issues with the ISP router wireless running with the Orbi Mesh, so I decided to disable the ISP modem wireless radios and switch the Orbi from AP mode to Router mode. However when I made that change I was no longer able to connect to both the internet or the Orbi router. I decided that I would clear the slate and reset the RBR50 to `factory defaults' and run the setup via the Orbi App on my iPhone. Reading through several other forum posts I ended up pressing/holding the reset button 30 seconds, kept it held down during power off and power on and released it when the status light switched to green. To my utter frustration (I repeated this many times), the wizard could not see or join the default SSID on the device label. I followed the app instructions and did it manually but another thing happened - the OLD SSIDs that should have been wiped by the "factory reset" were still coming up! Because they showed up, I used my credentials but the internet was not accessible, and the router did not display a magenta error condition of no internet.

I have tried many different things to resolve this but at the root of this is the fact that I CANNOT get this bloody unit to reset itself! Is there any `direct' way to physically plug in like telnet to a switch with a laptop? I saw one post about TFTP for a firmware installation but that is not going to get me to wiping this unit to it's `new' state. How is this made so difficult???

I have also tried enabling port bridging on the Actiontec and that had zero effect.

Netgear, if you are listening I am this close to throwing this product away and it sucks because I paid a premium price a few years ago; I expected to get more life out of this investment!