After lots of troubleshooting, it turns out the display issue was rooted in the interaction between my SD card and the pi boot sequence. I was originally using an old 4GB class 4 sdhc card that was super slow. Based on dmesg, my very uninformed hypothesis (guess) was that this was causing some sort of race condition between bcm2708_fb and fbtft. I have logs of both good and bad dmesg if anyone with deeper knowledge about that stuff wants to take a look. Once I switched to a 32GB U3 card the display started working reliably.
However, oddly, the wifi worked flawlessly with the slow card, but would not work out of the box at all with the new card. I did a bunch of things that ultimately resulted in wifi working w/o having to disable 5ghz on my AP (which is an older airport extreme that does not have the ability to disable 5ghz). Specifically, I connected directly from my laptop via ethernet, reconfigured eth0 to not use dhcp because that kept shutting down the interface when dhcp timed out, added a wlan0 config to /etc/network/interfaces that pointed to wpa_supplicant, configured wpa_supplicant accordingly, disabled bluetooth and deleted all of the cruft config files in NetworkManager that came from my repeated attempts at connecting via the norns UI.
I have no idea why wifi was working fine w the old slow card and not w the fast new card, but I have a suspicion, based on the display issue, that it stems from what happens when the pi is scanning for devices and loading various drivers on boot. That said, I’m new to the pi OS so, these are just guesses. Hope this maybe helps someone else!
