So, about a day after turning in my current code writing project, with 4 days left to earn full credit, my professor instructed us take out a component of our code writing project that actually made an operation in one of the functions more elegant to express in the language. He made the announcement that the component was a typo after one student announced their completion of the project without needing to use it. Stupid. Fucker!
But on to the happy part: I changed the code to follow the new instruction, & after almost 2 hours of additional frustration trying to patch up the cause of memory leakage, which involved to making & exposing more errors, my code works for all operations in any order, memory is no longer leaking, & I’ve turned the project in again. I feel VERY relieved.