Later I'll do an intersection on the sets keys-in-my-good-wallet versus keys-in-the-recovered-wallet and will report back
Interestingly, this intersection yields 0 keys. pywallet seems to have "recovered" some keys that I've never had in my wallet. Dang, it could have chosen keys with some funds in them!

. Well I'll repeat everything to discard a pebkac.
Ah, another thing worth mentioning:
$ bitcoind walletpassphrase foobar 10
error: {"code":-14,"message":"Error: The wallet passphrase entered was incorrect."}
$ python pywallet.py --passphrase=foobar --dumpwallet |head
'ecdsa' package is not installed, pywallet won't be able to sign/verify messages
The wallet is encrypted and the passphrase is correct
{
"bestblock": [
]