@jwaldmann many sincere thanks, my friend. i believe it's sorted for now 
the solution to this was a bit counterintuitive and i had to go against my instincts a little. there is a setting in Ableton to "reduce latency when monitoring". naturally we think latency is bad so of course we want to reduce it... but this latency compensation was actually causing the problem to begin with so unchecking this setting did in fact reset my MIDI notes back to all begin at the same time again. who knew!
perhaps this will not be an issue for other users will need to consider if using other DAWs like Logic, Bitwig, FL Studio, etc. maybe just an Ableton thing.
