Thick oil on wash, no visible activity, MLF?

[NJen]

Alright, so I've got a 55 gallon drum that I've got 50 pounds of white cane sugar, 20 pounds of light brown sugar, and 4 gallons of food grade molasses in, topped up with water to approximately 45 gallons. From there I add DAP, slightly less than the directions call for. They call 1tbsp/gal I have been using 1tsp, so 1/3 as much as is called for. Ends up being just about a cup per barrel. Aerated the whole wash, and made/added a starter using DADY. The Starting gravity was 1.086, pretty near to 11.5% potential. Fermenter temperature is a fairly constant (not perfect, but insulated and heated) 76 degrees F. PH of 6.5 when I start. Current PH around 5.5

This is the 5th time I've topped up and started another batch on an old one. As the washes have been fermenting out, I pull it off and put more sugars and water onto the trub in the bottom of my fermenter, and add more DAP and occasionally a sprinkle of some dry yeast just for good measure. So, the first 4 times I ran this same recipe I had little to no problems. On the 4th batch (the last one I did), it took a good 4 or 5 more days to finish out than normal. It usually takes about 14 days for me to get from my original down to about 1.010 (the furthest I've had any of these batches go so far)

So now about 4 days ago I ran a batch off, and so I started another one on top of the old one, like I've been doing now with this same recipe for a couple of months. I got everything put into the fermenter, gave it a good stir to reoxygenate and get the yeast moving again, and lightly covered, same process as always. The next morning I took a peek at it, it had a little bit of oil on it, I've seen that before no big deal. I figure it comes off the molasses, I usually skim it off before moving to the still. It seemed a little slow, usually there's a lot of movement going on within a couple of hours of restart, but this one is unusually slow.

Now it's been a couple of days, and my hydrometer hasn't moved, but there's a thick layer of oil floating on top. Not like what I've seen before. It's gotta be a half an inch deep of it. And it's almost perfectly clear compared to the usual oils I pull off, which are generally fairly yellow in color. I skimmed off all of this oil (into two mason jars) and added a new yeast starter, the starter looked fine, but 24 h later, still nothing going on in the fermenter.

At the moment, I'm assuming it went through a crazy strong lactic fermentation and very quick. It doesn't smell bad, really it just smells like molasses. not even a fermentation smell. I've had a couple of batches of wines and things that went through mlf in the past. Really I'm just trying to figure out what I did wrong here because my process and recipe has not changed.

I'm really trying to understand the science and art behind fermenting, and I've spent countless hours reading this, and other, distilling forums; watching youtube, reading research papers on fermentation and distillation theory, and other things. I've tried every set of words and phrases I could come up with to search for my issue, and now half a week later, I'm completely stumped. I'm coming to you guys for advice. I'm clearly doing something wrong, and I'm going to feel really bad if I have to throw out 75 bucks of sugars if I did something stupid.

Anyways, I'm hoping you guys can help and are willing to do so.

Thanks in advance for any helpful advice, please feel free to ask questions if I've left out any relevant information