Hi Llewellyn,
Man, sorry things didn’t work out here though I’m glad you gave the plugins a spin. Please go ahead and email us at support [at] theeventscalendar.com with your receipt and we’d be happy to process that for you.
Also, just a heads up–the event submission form for Community Events is indeed accessible on the front end. The URL is at [your-site]/events/community and there’s an option to make that page available to non-logged in visitors in Events > Settings > Community.
Hope that clarifies things a bit, but we’d still be happy to process a refund for you if you’d like. 🙂
Cheers!
Geoff