I'll be honest, I've played through some routes multiple times, every now and then I come back to see the updates and want to revisit memories of those routes...without having to do the entire path over again, since that takes hours for some paths. Is there debug code to unlock gallery or location in the files I can just peek? 

You can browse previously unlocked CGs in the Scene Gallery which you can find in Extras on the main menu. Unlocks for past CGs are persistent across builds so everything you previously unlocked should be there regardless of a version you are playing

aw beans, my WG and BE routes are empty even though I can still see the saves from earlier versions, dunno why. it isn't catastrophic or anything, might be some fuckery with my system

my first thought is this matches the behavior resulting from backend editing of files that circumvents some ren'py games not reading edited saves.

One of the big consequences of that is breaking persistent values, such as what's used to track both "seen dialogue" as well as how we unlock the CGs.

If you don't remember the specifics, go to the AppData\Roaming folder ( so C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\RenPy) and delete the whole folder, going "scorched earth". Your saves are stored in the local game folder, so you shouldn't lose anything, but this should be the last resort if you don't remember what you did otherwise.

It won't unlock the ones you "should" have, (you still would have to replay to get those) but it should allow you to unlock them going forward.

I suppose that would make sense! Unfortunately in this case I have not edited anything - seems silly when you can zoom through with skip. I just went ahead and did that and got it all back. It's a credit to the game's writing that in many spaces I just re-read the scenes! Thankfully whatever went wrong didn't keep me from re-unlocking them. Thank you for the scorched earth trick, if I ever need it for a renpy game I'll keep it in mind!