That GTA online patch fully broke all of GTA for me.

This game has gotten progressively worse since Sept. 17th. First days, everything worked. Then changes made in LSC and Chop via iFruit showed up real-life days late in game. Then iFruit stopped letting me login. Then Bawsdaq went down, meaning I had to stop playing the single player at 40% since last Friday because all my characters' money was locked away in "the cloud". Then GTA online let me create a character but no further, but at least let me see lobbies and crew lists. Then online wouldn't let me connect at all (error). Then snapmatic stopped working.

But worst of all, today, after a PSN Plus background patch that's supposedly meant to fix GTA Online, my GTAV game no longer turns on at all, freezing at the picture of the chick bent over the hood of the cop car. Tried "restored file system and database" on PS3, no luck.

Anyone else bricked by this update?

Worked great for me today. Got a few jobs going and it;s pretty fun, I guess.

First day it actually works for me, though. Yesterday, I made a jar of maple syrup waiting on the cloud servers.

That sounds terrible. I have a 360 and have only had one abortive try and the multiplayer so far so I am OK. Were you using the cloud for everything, including your saves in single player?

It has nothing to do with saves, I'm talking about Clicking on the start game icon from the PS3 XMB (or clicking Play/Launch game from 360 dashboard) it never gets past the point where The Rock Star logo plays with those sirens and redblue lights and the five stars on the top right of the screen... The disc/game just freezes there. All my saves are okay on both the hDD and Ps+ but the game never reaches a point where it could load them. I cannot play single player at all, even when I deleted my saves off the hDD to start fresh (backed them up to USB first).

The whole game is bricked

I was hoping they won't make the same sort of shit they did with GTA IV (Social Club, GFWL). Alas it seems they've done the same + more on top of that. This might just turn me off from buying the game too.

Why didn't you try to delete the patch first?

Online hasn't been working at all for me up until the last patch. Now everything works great. Sorry you're having trouble, though.

It sounds like you need to start from square one.
1) Move you game saves to PSN+
2) Delete the installs, delete any patches, delete anything else
3) Put the disc back in the system. Then let all the updates happen, then move your save from PSN+ and load it up.