Sadly, there have been so many changes at this point that it may be impossible to figure out what needs to be done to effect a fix (if that is even possible with your adapter).
I rarely ever tell people this, but it may be that reinstalling is the only way to methodically work through what needs to be done. Immediately after reinstalling create a snapshot of your system.
Was your wifi working on the live disk before you installed?
Was the wifi working immediately after install, before you rebooted?
If the answer is yes to either of those questions, you may be better to perform an offline install without an internet connection.
That way you could take a system snapshot immediately after install and have a known good working setup to roll your system back to.
We would then need to meticulously work through steps one at a time to pinpoint the changes that will result in giving you a working setup (after performing an update).
If you perform an offline install, do not make any changes without my instructing you specifically to do so. Simply take a system snapshot immediately after installation and then wait for me to tell you what to do.
Sorry, but this seems the most straight forward way of finding the cause, and any possible fix for your issues.