1) Dont bin your video card, it is unlikely to help in the long run.
On my (cough! yes I know but I did have valid reasons) Fedora system, I have been battling with Nvidia & Xorg drivers for years, they are certainly no better than AMD support wise.
My system is currently broken, turns out the library Nvidia distribute is too old to work properly alongside the latest Mesa upgrade, so using the nouveau driver until Nvidia update it.


2) Perform each step *manually* and keep an eagle eye on the console output and the logs.
When troubleshooting an issue I now always revert my configuration so that *everything* graphics related is performed manually either as root or a user from the VT command line, each step can then be validated and verified.
Do not be fooled into thinking blacklisting stops a module from being loaded, ensure you rebuild the initrd\initramfs without the driver.


Nine times out of ten if I can figure out what is breaking it can be fixed (e.g. I could choose to wind my Mesa library back).
I used to like WFW 3.11 through to Windows Millenium for the same reason, boot to a VT prompt to sort the problem!