Thanks, that finally gave me the clue that ‘A’ records are a thing 
I had already been to that top link of that Google search yesterday (EDIT: It turns out that link is only relevant to Windows hosted sites 
). In my defense, I discounted this link as I thought I had followed the 30 minute instructions as literally as I could.
The 30 minute instructions currently say:
- Create a DNS A record for the
discourse.example.com subdomain in your DNS control panel, pointing to the IP address of your cloud instance where you are installing Discourse.
The line breaks, on my screen, put that capital A as the last character on the line. Then, my brain simply skipped seeing the A. As a DNS newbie I did not know of the existence of ‘A’ records nor did I understand the difference between ‘pointing’ and ‘redirecting’.
Any chance that a moderator, reading here, can edit the 30 minute instructions and put single quotes around that very important capital ‘A’ 
Maybe even distinguish that an ‘A’ record should be created by making a subdomain (in GoDaddys case that ‘A’ record is hard to find and edit if you use GoDaddy Cpanel UI, read below), that subdomain redirection is not the same thing as pointing in an ‘A’ record and that there is a difference between ‘pointing’ and ‘redirecting’.
Now for the blow by blow details on how I fixed this (for those that follow here and have the same problem):
In the current GoDaddy Cpanel UI for my ‘Linux hosted site’ there is no access to ‘A’ records. I only seemed to be able to make ‘MX’ records under Cpanel Zone Editor.
In Cpanel, I removed the ‘redirection’ IP address since this is NOT what is needed… I needed an ‘A’ record that ‘points’ to my assigned DigitalOcean IP address.
The hard part here was to find out where to access that ‘A’ record which was made when you created a subdomain in Cpanel.
I ended up calling GoDaddy support for that, I hate having to ask for help 
Here is how you can access that ‘A’ record on GoDaddy Linux hosted sites and change the ‘Points to’ value (YOU CAN NOT ACCESS THEM FROM CPANEL) :
THEN:
THEN:
.
.
.
THEN, wait the requisite number of hours (up to 24 in GoDaddys case) for the change to take effect.
That is what I am doing now, I will report back whether it worked 
This worked and was a solution for me (although I am not quite sure why I only needed the DISCOURCE_HOSTNAME PREFIX as the ‘Host’ in Step 6 of my images).
