I've tried every password I can think of to no avail. This morning I've been looking into BTCRecover and finally got it running, but it's going to take a ridiculous amount of time to brute-force even a 6 character password with the hardware I have, because there's a good chance I used a combination including numbers and special characters in the original password.
Have you configured BTCRecover to use GPU since it could significantly increase brute-force speed?
Bearing the above in mind, is there someway I can extract the public wallet addresses from these wallet.dat files to know if this is something worth perusing or not? If I could at least find out what the situation was, I could then make an informed decision on the best way to proceed.
I'm 90% sure these are wallet.dat files created by Electrum Bitcoin Wallet. All are password protected (encrypted).
If Electrum doesn't show transaction history/address when you open the wallet file, it means the file is
fully encrypted and there's no way to extract any information from that file. I'd recommend you to check elsewhere such as your browsing history or email to find out Bitcoin address which could belong to you.