This part of reassembly is where it becomes painfully obvious that in order to do a "factory fresh" rebuild you need some tooling to get this stuff back the way it was. These tabs are just too tough to handle the way they are. When you try to straighten them, they bend in places that make it impossible to get them in the slots.

Here you can see how I cheated. I took a 1/32 cutting wheel and cut the tabs so I now have three small tabs instead of one unwieldy one. This solved my problems. I was able to straighten the tabs enough to get them in the slots and once in I used a punch and hammer to tap them over.