I am even more confused. I was able to use the recovery assistant to create Recovery USB stick, but when I boot and hold option key, it DOES NOT show up just like my "built in" recovery partition does not show up. This is really curious. Just to exclude keyboard shortcut error, I connected USB drive and rebooted again. The drive shows up but neither "buiit-in" or created usb recovery partition show up
I don't know if this would make a difference, but do you have any other USB devices/drives connected to the computer? If so, trying unhooking all USB devices and then try Command R.
Oh, and I don't see the Recovery HD with option key either, only with Command R.