Cyclone VGT Dev Kit boards - some new boards failing to boot from NOR Flash

Some more updates and summary info:
Update 11 June 2026 at 1:32 PM

1. We have 5 CVGT Dev Kit boards that will not boot the FPGA with our released production firmware. We do have Rev B boards that work fine with our firmware, so it is not all boards. Our production released firmware has been working for the old Rev A boards, and the new Rev B boards except for these bad 5.
2. I have diagnosed that the bad boards retry the FPGA configuration multiple times, then ultimately fail, as a watchdog timer in the MaxV design times out and turns on the ERR led on the CVGT board. On a rare occasion a couple of the boards may actually manage to fully boot, but then the next power cycle it will fail again.
3. For our production, we make a minor edit to the factory source - setting the final image to a read only version, and we use a write enabled version of that in our programming sequence:
1. Load the read/write edition MaxV image
2. Program the FPGA using Quartus tools
3. Load the read only MaxV image.
4. Three of the “bad” boards - if we load the factory max5.pof from Altera and switch the Factory Image over to the “User” setting, then they boot up and appear to be fine. The other two bad boards still fail in this mode. 
5. If I just recompile the Factory image - as is - using Quartus 23.1 Std 1, that compiled image does not work with ANY of the 5 bad boards. It does work with known good boards. 
6. Some of the bad boards fail to boot randomly when loaded with the “restore to factory” firmware, but they all seem to retry many times before they pass or fail. Retrying just once is an indication that something is wrong with the board. 
7. We notice one of the new bad boards has a different silk screen (it does not say UK/CA on it). Why are there two variants of the Rev B dev kit? Not sure if this is relevant but it seems odd.

Questions: 

1. Why did Altera invert the Factory/User switch state in the V22 CVGT Dev Kit Release?
2. Why does my compiled version of the V22 MaxV device act differently (behave worse) than the binary max5.pof that came with the V22 edition source code? It seems like the source code is not able to build the same design as the Altera binary. 
3. Is anyone else having issues with some of the CVGT Dev Kits booting from NOR flash?