I assumed it was all related
Even if unrelated. Thanks for chiming in, several of the threads in your post were new to me. This post for example seems to show the periodic sync is possible, but will have the liveness issue I was concerned about.
While we wait for someone with more information to hopefully respond, I suppose its time to ask a process question... I'm reasonably sure I know the literal one-line Makefile change required to fix this, but my impression remains this is an intended change, despite the (unintended?) consequences. If the forum doesn't garner a response Is the appropriate next step a GitHub issue?