From my experience trying to help people, I think a replacement in your case might've just been the best route, particularly if you weren't comfortable flashing things. Keep in mind that when you flash things, you're generally asked to wipe your entire phone, anyways. It's good practice, if you hadn't already or your wife hadn't, to set up things like your camera to default to your MicroSD card for saving items.
More experienced users are probably mainly over at the XDA Forum (this is the Verizon link, there are carrier specific forms as well for this phone and you need yours), as I am as well. You might've run into someone there that could've instructed you on how to fix the phone, but it's hard to say. Your phone might've had the re-partioning lock set or maybe Odin wasn't set up correctly. It's hard to say without having been able to boot into the phone. Don't hold me to that, though, I'm not an expert, just a tinkerer.
Regarding the Note line, I'd read at first that Samsung was going to ditch the Note line just to focus on the S line in order to prevent another disaster, but then I'd heard that they were going to go ahead with the Note 8. I really hope they do come out with a Note 8. Not sure if I'll be buying it though as ROM developers are just barely starting to come out with Android 7.1 ROMS for this phone and for me, it otherwise functions fine. Plus, there's no telling if the supposed Note 8 will have a removable battery or MicroSD card, not to mention it was difficult enough as it was to wait for an unlock for the Verizon variant, which, I get, is probably beyond your scope of knowledge, at least for now. With all that said, there's clearly a decent amount of work going on to attempt to extend the life of this phone.
