The other builder stayed with the stock v0.76 firmware and got things going and even has motion on his frame. He found out that his floor anchors are situated where at the extremes there is belt interference with things like the rollers of his CNC machine and legs on the shelving unit but that can be fixed by moving his floor anchors.
My machine took some effort to get up and running after v0.78 left it in an odd place and worst, downgrading to v0.77 firmware but still having v0.78 index.html.gz/fs data and maslow.yaml/config) left me with a forever loading white webpage. Read about that here:
But I got past that by figuring out how to hack the windows release data into the posix install system to put the v0.77 fs data on there which got me a working maslow.local web page and then I uploaded the v0.77 config/maslow.yaml file.
First thing I did was try retract all but only 3 motors moved. So to troubleshoot I powered off, swapped the encoder wires to the left of the router power cord, powered up and tried retract-all again and this time I saw that one motor move an inch. I stopped it, powered down, swapped the encoder wires back and after power up the retract-all started pulling in that 4th motor/belt.
But it kept stopping after moving only 1 inch or so but I kept pushing retract-all a half dozen more times and got it locked in place like the other 3.
Moving Z down to the base worked also.
With quite some force I was able to get the belts to release and then retract again. So things are looking good.