Well, I had to cheat in order to fix the problem. I only hope I didn't break anything in doing so.
For future reference, the problem was that the slug for my STATIC FRONT PAGE had somehow been set to "blog". The thing is, the Wordpress interface never displays the slug for the front page -- it just shows the plain URL -- so I had no way of knowing that the front page even HAD a slug.
I wound up using my rad database skillz to find and fix the issue:
1) I ran phpMyAdmin on my host server, and logged into the Wordpress database.
2) There, I viewed the wordpress_posts table (which also contains your static pages).
3) The post_name field is actually your slug. This is where I found that the "blog" slug actually belonged to my static front page. (Which explains the "clue" I'd discovered in my previous post.)
4) Verifying that no other "post" had a slug of "home", I modified the front page's slug from "blog" to "home" (which is what I had named the front page).
5) Then I modified my blog page's slug from "blog-2" to "blog" and exitted stage left.
Voila! Everything seems to be working the way I'd hoped.
I'm just very paranoid about directly making changes to strange databases. I will be very sad if I broke something else...
But, assuming I didn't, I hope this info helps the next person with this problem! :)
NOTE: PLEASE ALWAYS LOOK (HARD) FOR OTHER SOLUTIONS, BEFORE MANUALLY POKING AROUND IN A STRANGE DATABASE!!!