Gah! So close! I deleted caches, etc., backed up, reset, and booted back into the phone. The contacts behaved just fine! Of course, it didn't have any of my contacts, just the default AT&T ones, but still, it was working fine.
So, I re-rooted and re-installed the ATRIX 2 bootstrapp (which is what, I discovered, provides cwm recovery), and rebooted into cwm recover and performed the restore.
That all went great... but then the contacts are crashing again just like before.
Which shouldn't surprise me since I essentially just restored the phone exactly back to the way it was. :-/