After installing several Adobe trials, my Applications folder disappeared! Since I could still navigate to it by following application Aliases in the Dock, it seemed likely the Applications folder had simply had its visibility flag flopped.

JuhOS X was exactly what I needed. Download. Launch. Navigate to my root folder. Yep! Applications was there but "invisible." One more click and all was well.

JuhOS doesn't do much, but it does it really well, it's a tiny download, and it's free. I'm sure there was a command line routine I could have found, but I found JuhOS first.