Analytic tlamatini

One more thing: I don't know how much this means, but one of my professors did (out of the blue) encourage me to pursue the Ph.D. Also, this same professor had an esteemed guest faculty member (phil of religion) who showered much praise on my work for an ethics course, and she took notice.

Ask the faculty in your program. The ones who will be writing you letters. Ask for an honest assessment of your chances and for them to tell you how strong your letters will be. Maybe in an email so that they don't have to say it to your face. Also ask them what kind of PhD program, if any, they would expect you to be able to get into. The people on this forum don't have access to what matters the most: your actual work. I don't think your GPA matters if it is a result of transferring in courses from an earlier program, especially with a gap. Your grades in the new program matter, but what matters much more is what the faculty there actually think about your work. Grades in any grad program are not necessarily a good guide to that. (If they are bad they are, but lots of people get good grades despite faculty thinking their work is ok; an A in a grad course doesn't mean much.) If this is the kind of situation where they could have easily given you funding once you had been there for a bit, but haven't done so, that's probably a decent sign that they do not think your work is excellent. But you should ask them, because there may be other explanations for that.

P.S. you didn't mention anything about what other MA you could do instead. Theology? Literature? Computer science?
P.P.S.  if you're from the UK, you'll definitely get more subscribers than from the US, because everyone thinks a UK accent is intelligent.

First off, I am sorry that you have needed to pay even a cent for an MA in humanities. I would strongly advise against anyone who considers such a route of entering any grad school for humanities, without funding. It makes so little financial sense.
Second, your GPA is definitely wrecked. Most people I know working on an MA in philosophy had about a 3.7 or higher before moving to PhD. Maybe they were not normal. Maybe the programs are not typical (maybe there's grad inflation).
Third, if I am honest, whatever you want to do in philosophy almost certainly can be done without credentials and without all the suffering. There are no jobs, practically speaking, for teaching gigs that pay more than $30k a year. If you are able to do what you want without going the PhD route or get an MA in philosophy, then do that. Be creative. If you just want to be smarter and blog, then move to a city with a good library (or library system) and let philosophy be a hobby more than a jobby. If you want social connections, there are plenty of groups online interested in discussion and many have podcasters or Zoom reading groups. If you want to educate and provide resources to inform students interested in the subject, create a YouTube channel or Twitch and give it a go. The university system is broken.