NiMH battery care and feeding?

I have the battery pack on my Insight apart. 20 sticks of six cells each of NiMH batteries. At this point they're more like a pile of RC batteries than car batteries, so I was hoping so!E of you might know about the theory and practice of recharging and balancing them. It's easy to find someone to say "set your charger like this" but it's much harder to figure out what that actually means.
The general opinion is to not go below 1.0V per cell for the pack, but I was starting with batteries that were 2.5-3.5V for the whole pack, so we're already past that. They might all be dead, but what do I do to try and revive them?

I charged / discharged the totally dead ~5v pack in my civic hybrid with the hybrid-automotive kit. You pretty much had to grid charge it every other night or so of you wanted the IMA light to stay off. I'd imagine I could have tested the individual sticks and replaced the bad ones, but I opted for a new pack.

Right now I'm doing charge/discharge cycles to see if I can get a feel for how each stick is performing. This is a whole different area of automotive thinking for me.
In theory each stick has 5500mAh in it discharging at 2.0A. I did a charge at 5.5A and it shoved 1600mAh in. Not sure exactly what the parameters are that convince the charger that things are 'done', still reading. I set my first discharge at 1.0A so I need to up that for successive attempts. I have 20 sticks and the plan right now is to charge at 5.5A, discharge at 2.0A, charge again at 5.5A and see what things look like. Now that I know what I'm doing (kind of) I can hopefully get at least a couple sticks a day done.
I know the real test for these sticks is at much higher discharge rates than 2.0A, but that's all this charger will do, so that's round 1.

wish I could help... but my experience with NiMH's is 12+ years old... and was "surface level" at best

but I look forward to seeing what info piles in here

completely discharge(dead)let cool to room temp. fully charge, let cool to room temp. repeat 4-5 times. after charging final time let cool to room temp before install