It's been a long time since I visited this site.
Unfortnately there's other Hero members that have been up to a year already, some people more than that, after delivering all the required cryptographic proof. Insane indeed, but there are good news: theymos is working on some sort of automated system for account recovery. My advice is not bother until this system is in place, otherwise you will just frustrate yourself waiting for nothing. We can only hope that the automated system works and comes soon enough (apparently it should be coming sometime next year).
This should have been solved a long time ago, it didn't, so the result is a massive backlog of people waiting. It is what it is, what can we do?