Well, I found out the thermostat was bad, or at least the rubber gasket on the open/close "flap". It appears as if the thermostat itself still operates, as in opens and closes, however...
I read in some of the prior posts about thermostats and you all talked about a gasket failing and part of it breaking off and getting stuck in the opening. When I read that I was thinking that the mounting gasket was the one you were talking about. There is a second gasket that goes around the circumference of the opening flap.
For me it was this second gasket that seemed to roll off of the opening flat at a small portion. The gasket itself was still in one piece. Image putting a tire on a bicycle wheel, The tire fits on the wheel most of the way until you get to the last portion which needs to be pried onto the wheel. This is similar to what this gasket was like. Probably 80% of it was still mounted, but the 20% had "rolled" off the edge of the circular flap. This caused the open thermostat failure. The thermostat flap itself was not really open but it let enough through the small portion to trigger the fault. (apparently)

So now that CEL light is gone and the temp gauges are normal.
Back to observing the initial problem of the long starts/non-starts. I may start a new thread and summarize what has been done so far...?

 

Glad to here you got your coolant problem under control. Feel free to start a new thread for your other problem and we will go from there.

 

In one of the threads there is a picture of the gasket in question, and most mentions include the word "inner" implying more than one.

I have always suspected that the failure may be related to the system getting hotter than it should, maybe not actually overheating.

 

Glad to hear that it is resolved.