There’s a Windows focused guide (see below) but it can be generally applied to Linux & MacOS as well (just different paths and processes for stopping/starting services/daemons).
If you’ve already used it (or look through it now) and find it lacking / confusing please feel free to offer some suggestions on how to make it easier to use. One of the drawbacks of getting to know software well enough to try and write a How-To is that it because easy to skip steps that seem “obvious” or to forget to include things that have become second nature. 
Exporting a job will indeed export the settings for the job (though you may need to re-enter passphrases and re-authorize some cloud destinations). What it won’t do (at least as of 2.0.3.9) is is bring over any GLOBAL settings or the existing sqlite database.
When the new job is created it gets a “fresh” database so the Repair you did was really to sync the remote file info into the local database - but yes, it was essentially a database Recreate.
Really the only thing you could have done “better” would have been to manually bring the sqlite database file over to the new backup at which point the Repair shouldn’t have been necessary.