Messages app no longer works; plists or chat.db are missing

The reason this happened is that well... I sent a really really really long message and it crashed my messages app. So I figured I would try to delete the chat.db file in /Library/Messages but... there was no file there. Then I checked for the plist files in /Library/Preferences/Apple and the plists for messages were all missing. This is the only way I am aware of to solve the problem but these files are clearly gone! I figured maybe they were hidden for some reason so I used a terminal command to show all hidden files, which seemed to work but the files in question were still missing. Am I missing something? Is there another way to fix messages without these files? Should I find replacements for them?

NOTE:

I have also just tried looking in ~/Library/Containers/Data/Library/Messages/Archive but I don't even have a Containers folder in Library...