Hoooo boy. This has been a crazy fight with this issue....thank you for your help.
So, I tried the generic theme and it did show the Blubrry player. However that DIDN'T ensure that posting a new episode would connect to the file in Blubrry hosting and my feed. That was the original problem. So, I tried deactivating and reactivating Powerpress, removing yet another plug in, switching back to my original theme and trying the post again. Oh, and I also went into BluBrrry Settings and selected the "please fix".
I was noticing two things as I did this - my Google Chrome browser was alerting me to unsafe scripts. Before I was telling it to load them as I figured it might be something the page needed. This time, I didn't load the unsafe scripts. (It appears to be loading fonts from an unsecure site)
Secondly, it seems like powerpress was having trouble even opening the dialog box where I upload the episode. Mind you, I deleted it at least 10 times and reuploaded it to make sure I was starting fresh and not trying to post the same file twice. I'm not sure why that was happening, but finally I got it to load when I changed the name of the file.
Also, I think my feed is showing up as not validated when I tried it in cast feed validator, under https.
All that to say, I uploaded the file, hit publish and for a brief second, success! I saw the file under the player, everything played, and the new episode appeared in the feed.
Then, it all went south.
I went back in to add my featured image (I left it out at first to focus on the player issue) and added an exceprt. Thats ALL I did, thinking that the episode was now in the feed and I could modify the blog post. Then, I updated AND THE PLAYER DISAPPEARED AGAIN!
Not only that, the episode is gone from the feed. It's like it simply erased it. I have no idea how the feed was modified or why it would erase the episode. As you can see from the screenshot,
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s123/sh/54d5f7aa-3abc-4003-9872-171218ed4efa/022095c03085264ffcdba8cbbf6da033 the episode WAS published, but under the post it acts like it never happened. I'm not given an option to "modify episode", instead it looks like the file simply was published then deleted from the post. What?
I'm at a total loss now. Maybe my theme is the issue, but without knowing if my feed is still valid I now worry that all my efforts will be for naught because my feed is simply not working right.
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s123/sh/54d5f7aa-3abc-4003-9872-171218ed4efa/022095c03085264ffcdba8cbbf6da033