R7000 Bricked after 1.0.7.6_1.1.99 firmware

My R7000 never booted back up after the 1.0.7.6 firmware update that I initiated trough the router web portal yesterday. I thought it was still updating when I didn't get a response after 30 or so minutes so I left it overnight but the power status light just kept flashing the same the next morning. When I finally power cycled it I got the same result: flashing power led, once a sec. 

So I followed the "http://kb.netgear.com/19841/Reinstall-the-firmware-on-a-router-without-the-setup-CD-recovery-tool" article and I'm getting a TTL=100 response from the R7000 after setting up the network settings manually. The problem is that I've spent the better of my weekend trying to flash the firmware manually and no matter what I do TFTP2 does the "erasing Flash" step and proceeds to "upgrading flash" where it stalls after about 2/3 with the message "unable to get responses from the server" and tries again. Every time. Pinging the R7000 during the update process keeps returning 1ms TTL=100 responses so I've got one window telling me there's no connection and the other that there is. Doing it manually by activating windows TFTP and sending "tftp 192.168.1.1 R7000-V1.0.7.6_1.1.99.chk" displays "transfer successful" but the log shows that it only sent ~200kb at a speed of ~200kb/s out of the 27MB firmware file. Adding "-i" to the command as suggested on the Netgear support forum gets the file to transfer completely and without errors but the router, yet again, never reboots and behaves the same even after >20 minutes of "settling". On top of that after every unsuccessful try I need to reset the router since it stop responding to ping requests which makes the process excruciatingly slow. 

I'm still under warranty and am probably just going to return it during the week but having wasted this much time trying to fix a new router is just ridiculous so I wanted to put this out as a warning. Hopefully there's someone who knows what else I could try before I'm forced to take the trip to return it.

PS. I saw a post about the vulnerability a couple of days ago, made a point of avoiding the Beta a couple of days later, but still got duped.