Thanks for the advice, guys. I got it in eventually with a tiny amount of patience and some frustration.
I actually ended up cutting off the terminals on the end of the old switch, leaving me with the ribbon of wires. I spent an hour fishing the ribbon
backwards through the column until it came out the bowl. Then I cut the terminals off the new switch and taped the two ribbons back-to-back and fed it all down the column again. Of course that leaves me without terminals on the wires but I'm pretty good at soldering so I spliced them all back together and shrink wrapped them.
It's more work than it should have been but at least I felt like I was making progress this way instead of getting nowhere the other way. I ended up bending and almost breaking too many of the terminals trying to get the whole harness intact through the column and wire channel. And after all that I forgot the little light that illuminates the gear shift indicator...
