do-release-upgrade is making problems hard to resolve

I am not an expert in Ubuntu, so I make mistakes. So, I have made a habit of capturing my interactions when I am doing superuser chores. I have a score or so of scripts that cover most things.. The all begin with TERM=dumb and run in a subshell with output piped through some formatting code and captured in a file.

This does not work with do-release-upgrade because
1. early on it fails complaining it needs the ability to clear screen. les How import is that? Really?
2. at some points, actual graphic windows are shown and interactions performed there.

Perhaps the current arrangement works for experts. Less so for us mere geeks (to be clear: I've been programming since 1962 (really), have used Unix or its variants since 1984, have used Linux since Caldera Network Desktop, have a PhD in computer science (from 2002) and spent the last decade of my career teaching that subject at Cal Poly, ending in 2010.)

This outburst was occasioned by my need to repair a system by restoring an old backup and upgrading it. In going from bionic to focal, I encountered two errors that I had to capture quickly, manually by copy-and-paste. I do not really understand either of them.

The first was short and somewhat contained:

Job for snapd.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl status snapd.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.
snapd.failure.service is a disabled or a static unit not running, not starting it.
snapd.snap-repair.service is a disabled or a static unit not running, not starting it.
Failed to restart snapd.mounts-pre.target: Operation refused, unit snapd.mounts-pre.target may be requested by dependency only (it is configured to refuse manual start/stop).
See system logs and 'systemctl status snapd.mounts-pre.target' for details.

The second was apparently unformatted or at least lacking newlines, and being unable to scroll the screen, I was only able to capture the end of it. I'm quite frustrated by not being at least able to see the entire message, but here's what I got:

           dpkg: warning: package not in status nor available database at line 217: python-wstools:all
                                                                                                      dpkg: warning: package not in status nor available database at line 218: python3-ndg-httpsclient:all
                                                                                     dpkg: warning: package not in status nor available database at line 219: python3-pyasn1:all
                                                           dpkg: warning: package not in status nor available database at line 220: python3-xdg:all
                              dpkg: warning: package not in status nor available database at line 221: python3.6-doc:all
   dpkg: warning: package not in status nor available database at line 222: qt4-qmake:amd64
                                                                                           dpkg: warning: package not in status nor available database at line 223: qtcore4-l10n:all
                                                               dpkg: warning: package not in status nor available database at line 224: ruby-did-you-mean:all
                                        dpkg: warning: package not in status nor available database at line 225: transfig:all
        dpkg: warning: package not in status nor available database at line 226: wine-stable:all
                                                                                                dpkg: warning: package not in status nor available database at line 227: x11proto-composite-dev:all
                                                                              dpkg: warning: package not in status nor available database at line 228: x11proto-damage-dev:all
                                                         dpkg: warning: package not in status nor available database at line 229: x11proto-fixes-dev:all
                                   dpkg: warning: package not in status nor available database at line 230: x11proto-xf86vidmode-dev:all
                   dpkg: warning: found unknown packages; this might mean the available database
                                                                                                is outdated, and needs to be updated through a frontend method;
                                          please see the FAQ <https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/FAQ>
                                                                                                     (Reading databas(Reading database ... 428307 files and directories currently installed.)

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:20.04.41
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-152.169-generic 5.4.235
Uname: Linux 5.4.0-152-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: wl
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.27
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: skip
CrashDB: ubuntu
Date: Tue Jun 20 14:33:34 2023
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to focal on 2023-06-20 (0 days ago)
VarLogDistupgradeXorgFixuplog:
 INFO:root:/usr/bin/do-release-upgrade running
 INFO:root:No xorg.conf, exiting