Thanks for all the kind words! Always happy to help out folks here in the community, especially a fellow drummer!
I took a minute to go over the questions you had (although admittedly it appears like you figured out the solution to most of them) and walk through how you can get the comment counts displaying in the video below:
As promised, here’s the code I used within my HTML Embed element (with some adjustments based on your specific project) however keep in mind that you’ll want to swap out the placeholder class and update the SLUG text with your dynamic field:
<a class="YOUR_CLASS" data-disqus-url="SLUG" href="/post/SLUG#disqus_thread">Commend Count</a>
Feel free to reference the links in my previous comment if you’d like to check out my live site or the read-only link and let me know if you run into any other problems 