If the puppy isn't working because a cable came loose (the tail), then the watt wouldn't work. The watt receives its signal from the cross over in the puppy.
I don't know your cables very well, but cable matching is definately more apparent with a highly resolving speaker, like the W/P.
Not being a bass fanatic myself, I find that the bass on my WP (5.1s) is quite good, certainly tight and fast. However, I recently installed a pair of balanced Cardas Golden Cross when I purchased a new CDP and found that I lost some of the speed and impact of my bass with these cables.
My guess is that there could be a couple of things at play; cables, other components (you mentioned with the Hales you also felt the sound was too bright), and a combination of placement and room acoustics.
As for room acoustics, I would buy a couple of panels of the Auralux foam and mount them to a very simple frame to make them more rigid (I just cut strips of thin plywood and glued them to the foam to make them rigid enought to lean against things/walls without sagging too much). With about 4 of these, you can then place them around the room in a temporary fashion, combined with adjusting the speaker placement, tilt, toe-in, etc. . . This is a very low cost approach to help determine what changes in the room will really help. You can buy the Auralux at most Guitar Shops. It may not be the best product (it is pretty good), but this is cheap and can tell you a lot about where you might be having problems in your room.
To me, it sounds like you have a very strong bass null or void in your room and a lot of upper frequency reflections that are creating this bright sound. FWIW, I have found that my W/P are not bright, detailed definately but not bright like I have had with other speakers.
