Well, got it wrapped up last evening—by midnight anyway (we got a late start). On the slipped strut I first fruitlessly tried various clamps across the gap, attempting to span from the bottom of the strut to the lip at the top of the wheel carrier, to see if I could crank them together. Good in theory, but (as usual with such endeavors) it just wasn’t to be. Not enough room to work.
So we liberally applied W-D down into the gap and then, lowering the lift some and breaking out the floor jack and a 3’ length of 2x4, did this:
We jacked to the point that we were lifting the strut a little…though we were also lifting wheel carrier along with it. But we were putting upward pressure on the strut, and while that was happening I grabbed a small piece of 2x4 and, using it, hammer-tapped on the top of the wheel carrier. Per side, it probably took a dozen medium blows with the hammer, but we got it moved and the holes lined up. Got the pin through (the kid had done a cut-off on the old drop links, giving us something to insert while we waited for new ones to show up).
It’s possible we didn’t need to do the lift/2x4 bit at all, but it seemed to work.
At that point we basically started putting stuff back together.
As seems to be the usual anymore, had trouble getting the reinforcement plate over the all the studs at once. Tapping into my wood working resources, I had brought several clamps with me (hoping to find a way to make one of them work on realigning the strut/wheel carrier situation). The kid says let’s put them to work here, so we did. One wasn’t long enough, so we stacked them. I had my doubts, but it worked:
Was tempted to drive her home last night but decided against it for a couple reasons. If by some chance we had some post-project issue or other that we had to deal with, I'd rather do it in daylight than at 1:00 a.m. It was also pretty chilly for top-down driving, whereas it’ll be perfect for it today.
Man oh man do I love working under a lift
Thanks everyone for your input!