yeah, just a bad combination of fork, brake and rim.
I usually find that cartridge type V-brake pads are thinner, but it might not make a difference in your case.
Your unfortunately right. Every combination of spacer had no better result with vertical alignment. I switched back to my original v-breaks which fit perfect, and just swapped out the pads for new ones.
Thanks for saving me from going nuts. Well at least completely nuts.