It did start up in R&D mode I had to hold the power button in for a while then it booted up. Once in R&D mode, I set the regional settings, and then the home screen was there and it looked fine. I powered it down, and then it started the reboot cycle. Took out the battery and restarted it and it went back to the home screen. Also in this mode I noticed that if I hit SYM/CTRL and the Down arrow the screen completely fades out and I have to remove the battery to reboot. Is this a known bug, I've been searching and can't find anything.

After this I also flashed the device and same results, I also tried to flash the eMMC but wasn't able to, as for some reason it is not recognizing the device on the USB the 2nd go around...

Maybe my issue might be related to the USB, the problems originally started with the phone appearing to charge in animations and LED display, but as soon as I removed the charger nothing.