What if i have an older backup of the same world? It's not recent, but it is a copy/paste of the save folder. Would that work? I may try it, actually. I'll edit this with my results.
Results: World is still there. The entirety of my "base" is still here. All i have to do is figure out what I am missing from my inventory. I could be wrong, but I believe ANY level.dat file would suffice. All it seems to do is hold your player stats, like your levels, health, hunger, inventory, xp, etc. so since you are already going to have to "give" yourself your stuff back, the particular level.dat seems unimportant. Again, I may be incorrect there, but that is how it appears to me.
Thoughts: Maybe it has to do with morph? I know there are a lot of things you can NOT do while in morph, sleeping being chief among them. I was a Zombie Pigman mining down the center of a ProjectRed volcano with a Tinker's Construct hammer when my world crashed. I don't know if ALL of my recent crashes have been with me in morph though, so it really is just a thought. I know there have been times where i was just walking towards something, like my ME Access Terminal when I crashed. Food for thought, I suppose.