Suggestions and Ideas to correct our stupidity?

Have multiple defaulted loans through payday lenders. All but one have been charged off. Have other debts as well on credit report that are behind. Signed up for debt settlement program and it has obviously SLAMMED our credit scores! Only 3 accounts have been paid off in almost 3 years. We have paid in over $8K for them to pay off $5700 roughly. We pay $619 per month for the debt settlement payment. We have missed some months payments and are finding it not only difficult paying that amount, especially since I lost my job in September, but the fact that so few bills have actually been paid off. They did have 4 payday loans that had settlements that were accepted and all but one months payment had been made. This was due to a potential law suit on another account. What they told me they do is stop all payments to other accounts and put everything into the possible lawsuit so it can be prevented. Happily, it was paid off, sadly for the AMOUNT THAT WE ORIGINALLY OWED! We have also been paying off some of the bills and contact them to tell them to removed those from the program. They tell us, "Oh, okay, we can do that but you should leave those to us to handle, we could save you more money." Umm...no they haven't been at all!
We let the payday lenders know that we are working with the debt settlement company and all calls and emails have stopped. Some of these payday loans are through tribal lenders and two are not. One lender doesn't even show on any of our credit reports. Our concern is that it's been over two years since we last made payments on some of these payday loans and we have not received any contact whatsoever from them. We are considering going solo on just taking the $619 per month and targeting smaller accounts first then moving up to the larger ones. I see that you have some expertise in handling payday lenders. We have had multiple loans with them and several that have been paid off, on time in the past. Any suggestions in handling these payday loans? We are now in a different State from where we took the loans out in. We had planned on paying them off with the sell of our home...then the prices dropped. Any suggestions that you can think of? We were thinking of saving up a couple of months once the lower loans are paid off to offer maybe half of what the original balance was? The lenders are Great Plains Lending, Plain Green, Rise, Net Credit, Cash Central, Check City and Brookwood.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.