Well, you are half-bricked… Not being able to access the Dashboard or SSH, and with file permissions that are now screwy, you have a device that is well on the way to being bricked. Since you can’t get in via SSH to fix the permissions problem (see below), and you don’t care about the data, the easiest resolution is probably going to be an unbrick.
I remembered a fix to a permissions problem that got introduced with one of the firmware upgrades. The solution was to run a recursive chgrp:
Admittedly, that was a problem with groups…
