Sorry for not getting back to you, @therob. I took a break from the forum for nearly a month now. Just To answer some of your questions:
I could not figure out what I did wrong considering the contacts. AFAIR, the “etc.” concerned the wallpaper, ringtones, alarm soundfiles, and contact pictures. The latter had a strage side effect: I used to have high-res contact pics. (When tapping on a pic in the People app, you can see the original resolution.) Since the restore (the ‘second’, non-Titanium, via the ‘internal’ MediaTek B&R app) after updating to 1.6, all “old” contacts have low-res pics. New contacts have proper resolution, like before. And the backup/restore process when updating to 1.8.5 worked nearly flawelessly, BTW: everything was restored except the alarm soundfiles and ringtones. Which does not really matter.