After a week quiet I'm printing again

Sorry I haven't posted much about Joe's Makerbot the past few weeks. The reason is that Joe's Makebot has been sitting cold for a week. The reason is after my last repair I also upgraded the firmware to the latest version of Sailfish. I took everything back to stock in the firmware and... then I ran out of time for fiddling. So the makerbot had to sit until I could calibrate things. This week I found that time and I'm printing again!

Between some silly things printed for my kids I've been testing out supports again, hoping that the return to defaults would fix whatever it was that was causing me problems. Spoiler alert, it didn't.

I made a simple sphere to test out and turned on supports. no dice. On the left is a sphere I started printing without supports accidentally, and on the right is the sphere and the supports that printed it. Sadly, there's very little difference between the two. I've adjusted the settings, I lowered the support minimum angle to 30 (not the way I expected that to go) so it prints more support material  and no matter what I do the result is the same, not a sphere on the bottom. The top looks good, but the bottom looks crap. I'm afraid I'm going to have to reach out again to anyone who might be able to tell me what I'm doing wrong.