“you would certainly laugh at how obsessive I am”
I am indeed thinking that you are too obsessed about which school you are attending. There are a lot of very good universities. The top schools do not have a monopoly on anything that they are going to teach an undergraduate student.
Someone I know very well did their bachelor’s degree (in four years) at a university that is NOT in the US News “top 100” list (it is between 100 and 120 in some rankings). They did their graduate studies at an Ivy League university that has a great program in their major. The entire thing took 6 years and they ended up with two master’s degrees from an Ivy League school.
When I was a graduate student at a “top 3” university (HYPSM level), there were students there in the same program who had done their bachelor’s degrees at a very wide range of schools. Most probably had done their bachelor’s at a “top 100” university, but I am not sure that all had. There was one single university that I could find that had sent more than two students to this particular program at a top 3 university – it was not (and still is not) in the US News top 50.
I think that you should probably (many details have been left out so I cannot be sure) get your bachelor’s degree at the school that you are transferring to. Then depending upon your major you can consider working for a couple of years. Then you could reasonably be looking at graduate school at the school of your dreams.