Here is the result of your suggesion: What am I missing -- do you know where this is logging?

Here is what I found in the logs:
[ERROR] DotNetNuke.Services.Upgrade.Upgrade This package type is not registered. - JavaScript_Library

and in the log.resources:

[ERROR] DotNetNuke.Services.Upgrade.Upgrade This package type is not registered. - JavaScript_Library

What can I do to register the Java Libriary?

That is why I am here, to get help to figure out what the cause is. So far I have gotten responses to push through the upgrade, after days of finding and replacing, I still have no idea what is wrong. I have been reading as much information as I can trying to diagnose the underlying cause here but I am at a loss.

A few hints as to how to diagnose the cause would be greatly appreciated (I am a newbie to DNN and was tasked with updating the company intranet site).

Please help.

I have tried it every which way I could think of.
First I did from 07.01.02 > 8
Then I tried from 07.01.02 > 7.04.00 > 8.0.2

It may have said 8>8.1 after I tried to manually execute the SQL from the management studio.

I have just restored the backups and am going to give it another shot, this time I am going to try to disable all of our custom (in house) modules first. I think my issue may come down to the fact that our portal has 30+ custom modules and who knows what else.. There have been Windows devs adding to this portal for years with zero documentation.

Now, when they failed to upgrade successfully, they sent it to me becuase I am the resident IIS guru, but this is not an IIS issue.