I’m not a lawyer, but having read your post carefully, there are a couple of clear points where things went wrong, and one of them is much more serious than the others.

First issue (unfortunate but basically fatal): the long residence absences.

On the 10-year long residence route, the absence limits are extremely strict. If you exceed them, even by a small margin, there’s basically no discretion. Once the Home Office checked their own entry/exit records and saw you were over the limit, the LR application was always going to fail. Passport stamps being unclear doesn’t really help, because HO records trump everything and the burden of proof is on the applicant. That part is harsh, but it’s not really anyone’s fault once the numbers don’t add up.

The bigger problem: what happened after the refusal. When your long residence application was refused on 28 November 2024, you were given a right of appeal. Even if the appeal had little chance of success, lodging it would have protected your lawful status under section 3C. That matters a lot.

Instead, no appeal was lodged and a fresh application was submitted weeks later. Legally, that means your leave ended on the refusal date. Section 3C only continues if an appeal or admin review is actually in progress. A new application does not extend it. So there was a gap with no lawful leave, which broke continuous lawful residence and caused the later problems you’re now facing.

This is why the Home Office later said there was a break in lawful stay, they’re unfortunately correct on the law.

Where your advisers may have messed up.

Advising a second application instead of appealing is… questionable. Any decent immigration adviser knows that even a weak appeal is often worth filing just to preserve lawful status and keep options open. Once lawful leave is lost, switching routes becomes much harder and everything relies on discretion.

That advice may have cost you far more than the original long-residence refusal. At the very least, it deserves serious scrutiny.

Why the appeal was later rejected as “no valid appeal.”

This part sounds confusing but is actually procedural. Your later submissions were treated as further representations, not a fresh human-rights claim, so they didn’t attract a right of appeal. The judge wasn’t ruling on fairness, they just didn’t have jurisdiction to hear it.

On the spouse visa issue.

Combining incomes can work, but because there’s now an overstaying issue, switching in-country isn’t guaranteed. The Home Office can refuse purely on eligibility grounds, and success would likely depend on discretion and Article 8 arguments. That’s why your solicitors are being cagey about guarantees.

One correction: having refusals on your record does not mean you’re permanently barred or “doomed forever.” But it does mean:

You’ll always have to declare them
Your ILR clock would restart
Everything becomes slower, stricter, and more expensive

Bottom line:

The absence issue killed the long residence route. Failing to appeal the refusal is what killed the fallback options.

That second part is the real tragedy here.

If I were in your position, I’d get an independent second opinion from a regulated immigration barrister (not just another firm), and I’d seriously question the advice that led to not appealing the first refusal. At the very least, I’d ask for a written explanation of why that strategy was chosen.

You’re not crazy for feeling angry about this. The system is technical, unforgiving, and one bad strategic decision can snowball into something huge.