Tom E, thanks for your comments! 
I'll be honest with you. Your mustache is going to get worse before it gets better.

This is good to hear. I figured as much, but it's worth hearing it from people like you that this won't pass quickly. 
On the issue of split hairs, do you experience that with the hair on your scalp? That looks as curly as your beard and I notice you keep it pretty short, so I wonder if it's just a tendency of your hair and your beard is the first place you've had to deal with it. You're doing all I know to suggest to tame it, though, so I hope someone else will have a suggestion here.

It's weird because the hair on my head is fine. I wear it short now but I used to grow it quite long. It's very dense/full and very curly, but the actual hairs themselves, while not "thin" per se, are much thinner than my beard hairs, which are thick. Not sure if it's the oils in my scalp or whatever else, but my head hair has never had a problem staying healthy and moisturized, without ever using conditioner. The beard is just wirey and feels like straw. And the split ends are sometimes pretty remarkable... like split in 3/4/5/6 ways, like the ends exploded! I had heard that using beard clippers can do this, so I thought maybe because I never shave with a razor that my hairs had always been damaged but I never grew them long enough to see the full effects as I'd clip them down before too long. But after trimming away a lot of the split ends a few weeks ago, they're cropping up all over the place now. This may just be the way things go for me, which is fine. Just means getting the scissors out every week or so and hunting around for the worst culprits. But with this renewed dryness has also come a new itchy phase, which I also thought I was passed. It's worse than the earlier phase too.

As for the questions about the wife (martinco too), I'm not quite sure how it just dawned on her recently. I have been incredibly busy with work and spending less time at home than usual, but who knows. It happened at work this week as well though. Nobody had commented on it until this week, then all of a sudden everybody who saw me stopped and said, "hey, you've got a beard." Seem to have reached some kind of threshold or critical mass haha.