Why does my Loop end after 11 Loops?

[bplus]

but the jury is still out on if Recursion is a worthy replacement for a Do..Loop/For..Next etc.

The jury has been back a long time ago, loops are better because recursion can burn through huge amounts of memory not easy to predict, neither is recursion faster. So for serious project like Opening file and processing it you want straightforward method.

Recursion is cool and is great learning experience for hobby coder. Recursion does have advantage of doing things like solving Sudoku Puzzles or Mine Sweeping empty cells or just drawing trees, allot easier to code than straight forward methods. The stacking tracks all the different paths your code has to go to cover a situation. 

Opening and storing a file into data for processing is a single path from start to finish and the most effective way is not recursion.