I just registered to thank user Revalin for his script. Hope you're reading this! THANK YOU!
For anyone in the same predicament as I was (password was a long combination of known passwords, with slight variation in shifted characteres) use this script
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=85495.msg3748929#msg3748929. Fill in rpc_pass field with pass from your conf file, and put your rpc username in the script field request.basic_auth "" inside the quotes. I used this to recover my Litecoin wallet so I changed the port setting to 9332.
Launched litecoind, fired up the script after installing ruby, and got my password back in under a minute. Just beautiful. Thanks again Revalin.