: First things first, a sitemap is only necessary if a search engine crawler is encountering difficulty crawling your website or your website contains a complex structure and hierarchy several

First things first, a sitemap is only necessary if a search engine crawler is encountering difficulty crawling your website or your website contains a complex structure and hierarchy several levels deep. A well built website rarely actually requires a sitemap and with inbound links pointing to the site, a search engine crawler will do their business in crawling and indexing what it is allowed and instructed to do so.

So in this sense, I wouldn't worry overly about your sitemap.

However, it sounds like there is likely more critical issues on your website than whether the sitemap is being picked up (or it could be that it is, but all the links in the new sitemap are 404'ing due to other issues).

I'd suggest you test a few URL's (versions before the redirect and after the redirect) in a header response tool and see what header response code is being returned.

Any URL's you wish to be indexed should return a 200 OK code.
Any old URL's that are being redirected to new destinations should return a 301 redirect code.
Any new URL's that have old URL's redirecting to them should be returning a 200 OK code (although you could well find that they are in fact returning a 404 code due to a problem with the redirects).

I'd also recommend using a tool such as Screaming Frog or Xenu to crawl your website, either of these will display what header response code is being returned for every URL's on your website, highlighting any crawlability issues.

Within Google Webmaster Tools, you can also fetch URL's as GoogleBot to see what is being returned when it visits your URL's. You'll also be able to see a list of the URL's returning 404's so you can drill down deeper into the root/cause of the problem.

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