I haven’t read the entire post so if this has been mentioned, forgive me!
There have been several people on another board who have been making accusations about a certain registrar “stealing” domains that people have searched for and have come up as available.
EDIT: don’t know if godaddy was that registrar or not.
If you searched whois before purchasing you might have been nailed by this (although I have never seen one registered to a real person, all the examples have been companies but all ended up as parked).
You might want to try a different a different registrar and do not search a domian in whois first, approach it as if you know it’s available and purchase it right away.
Again sorry if this was posted before.