The swing arm has to be removed to entirely remove the drive shaft, could be wrong but all the problems are coming from the splines at the rear end.
Put a 7/16 or11mm socket no more that 12mm tall in the tube to hold the shaft in position then just slide it on,
pushed the unit on slowly and it went right in the splines first go, the pictures do not do the unit justice the paste/grease was still dampish and plenty of it, as said gave it all a good cleaning and applied some new paste will check again at 90000miles.