Thank you for the suggestion! Unfortunately, I had tried the plugin trick with no luck.
About 2 hours after I posted here, I figured out the solution… had to delete and recreate the “groups” page itself! For some reason, it could not link to the buddy press page linkings under buddy press settings after setting up the child theme, and found buddy press was giving an error in there. Deleted the old page, created a new one, hooked it back up, and it’s working now. Thanks again!!
even after going back to parent theme, the group plugin and section is not working. admins logged in are not able to create new groups, keeps giving error 404
