I shut down bitcoin-qt. When I started it again, it started with some bitcoin-25.99* version, and no wallet was loadable. It was only a node with peers, nothing else.
It sounds like you compiled it from source and did so without wallet support enabled. You probably didn't have the wallet dependencies installed in a way that the build could find them, so it didn't build the wallet component.
if you want to use bitcoind, it should already come with the bitcoin-qt that you already have. They are released together. Regardless, there is no difference between the functionality of bitcoind and bitcoin-qt, except that bitcoin-qt has a GUI. The RPCs all behave the same way.
What happens if you just wait longer for the migration to finish?