Yeah it was the chicken & egg problem.  You cant have Sancs agreeing on the payment height without a POW consensus, and we couldnt have a POW consensus without Sancs telling us the exact list of sanc-public-addresses and amounts to pay (so we went in loops).  Then we disabled the payment checking rule and made it into a future spork rule - and now the nodes at the highest height are not rejecting blocks, and now the sancs are coming back online.