Karst,
Aha! so it's the market dominating companies introducing standards creep/corruption again then! Seen that so often in the IT world.
On a similar notes, I was somewhat suprised to learn that a default (new out of box) decoder is not mandated to have address 3 at first power up. Several people have told me it was the standard, but I found the "Myths" list on NMRA and yep - it's a myth :-)
8 people doing testing should do the trick!? I expect you? could recruit a few more on this forum if you needed to :-)?