Yes, I tried eMMC boot on every emmc capable OS that the Pine-fork of Etcher suggested. And I also tried openBSD as well on suggestion from freenode #pine64 user, to no avail.
I then was able to order a usb3->eMMC adapter, and was able to debug the USB and determine my assertions were correct: those eMMC chips ignored the first read operation.
I didn't have a jtag for the allwinner chips, but I also did have a serial console. I'd like to say I went above and beyond for testing what I'm defining as defective merchandise.
Now, the A64-LTS, the rtc batery holder, and the POE injecters are pretty darn good. I was just hoping for better overall performance with using eMMC.