Hey. I'm loving the name of your thread... ha ha.
I second the diagnosis of A&P for your two strange energetic events. The initial good feelings when you started to have success with the concentration practice sounds like 1st jhana, or the nana of mind and body to me. I've found that as you go through the nanas, it's good to know how to play the concentration states when there's a good opportunity. It feels to me like consciousness is slowly expanding out like a root system when I go up jhanas or nanas, like consciousness is fitting itself to new molds. That's just personally how it feels, but it seems consciousness is expanding in some way. So I suppose "growing pains" could be a way of discussing the annoying ways in which your tool for insight constantly changes and works in different ways at different times. If you've had success getting into the 1st jhana, I highly recommend developing that ability, up to the 4th if you can, but if you can get the 1st jhana, you can probably at least make the 3rd jhana in short time with some practice.
Anyways, the point being this... when you're doing noting practice, you can simultaneously develop concentration, or vice versa. From my experience, it's easier to be in jhana and then switch to vipassana. I like to do one jhana, get absorbed in it as possible, then once the mind feels the pull to go to the next, use that moment to switch to noting, basically letting the jhana deconstruct by seeing the 3 characteristics. Since dispassion and letting go of mental fabrications is the goal, this also seems to train a muscle in the mind that allows you to intuitively drop fabrications. My theory of why this is so effective is because equanimity drastically increases your ability to see what's going on clearly and release mental motions that you make. So by doing jhana, you get the mind sharp and acute, full of equanimity (which is developed in every jhana), and then you use that equanimity to do vipassana from a stable base. Then, you can start to use that same muscle to do pure noting practice and move on from stage to stage effortlessly, with good feel how your mind is expanding along the way. Pure noting does seem to work for some people, but even if you're not going to take the raft with you once you get to the other shore (path and fruition up to 4th), it still might be nice to take the time to develop a steady raft (concentrated mind, good at jhana) to make the journey smoother. And if you read MTCB, it should be quite obvious that there are some... potential whitewater rapids, even before you've entered the "stream". ;)
Or, maybe just keep noting everything until you hit equanimity. That didn't quite work for me though, and being stuck at the dark night stages is less than ideal. Past the A&P, I think there needs to be a lot of releasing going on. You have to release some of your effort to note objects and let the mind find it's new focus, where there are new, deeper things to note. 3rd jhana is great here, since it's very calm, serene, quiet and dark, gearing towards dropping down, deeper, like falling asleep, in that the immediacy of physical senses calms down and you're left with mental boundaries rather than physical. If you cross the A&P in a sit, focus on the joy as it happens, and let it fade to calm and simple, silent happiness. The mind calms down quickly when it has the simple happiness and naturally lets go of a lot of tension. The focus naturally shifts outwards towards the edges of your boundary of awareness, as opposed to locking on to individual, immediate objects.
Those are some of the things that that helped me personally get from A&P to EQ.
Good luck,
-A Blathering Enthusiastic Person

Edit:
Right now I feel like I'm back to square one. I'm so frustrated every time I try to sit, that I can't even focus on for more than one or two breaths before becoming fidgety or distracted. When I try to observe my stream of consciousnesses, there isn't anything there other than a feeling of stress that I can't feel impartial to, and that won't fall out of consciousnesses.
If the A&P is so great and energetic and enlightening and glorious and insightful, then why would we need to go deeper? If there weren't some unpleasant processes that we mentally fueled, undetected by the usual threshold of awareness, then why would we need to keep going deeper? The problems didn't just appear, they were there, and it's actually a significant success, although annoying and confusing, to get closer and closer to the source of those tensions, peeling off layer by layer of stupid, unnecessary, annoying, compulsive mental conditioning.