Alright, so I contacted EA support through chat last night in an attempt to properly link MY origin with MY xbox live account. That took 4 hours... 4 hours of my life. I don't know if I can even summarize those 4 hours, but have been asked to wait until Monday (when their 'specialist team' will be in) so they can basically undo what they did and go from there.
My actual origin account now uses a different email address of mine to login, the old login email now accesses a strange new origin account that is basically blank, but linked to my gamertag. They for some reason wanted to switch the email I use for logging to xbox live to the same email address as my origin account had before, and as a result that same email leads to a NEW microsoft account (which is blank and appears to not be linked to any xbox profile)... so that only gave me errors trying to login to xbox live that way - which I don't think they believed even when I copy/pasted the error because I was basically told to do the same 2 things repeatedly and get nowhere for at least an hour. (I can still login to live using my original information at least, even though they seem to think that I am a moron and it actually now uses my other email address)
So now I have to wait until Monday so they can "interchange the email to its original state".
Great... I never wanted to change its original state and questioned doing that to begin with.... I just wanted an achievement. At this point my head hurts and thinking of customer support makes me want to cry in a corner. Consider this partially as venting but also an update for EA support helping on this page, because I am pretty positive that due to any changes the EA chat representative(s) has made, I wont be able to receive any further help from here and have to wait on their 'specialist team' now. /end rant
***Round 3 - another hour and a half on chat.. whatever they did I was instructed to give it 2-3 hours to take effect... about 8 hours later I can no longer access EA nation or any online features. I can't even tell if the servers should be working right now or if they just screwed it up for me specifically while they were "fixing the problem" ...the chat rep for round 4 has a lot of catching up to do :/