That must be it, the scores of people who had this issue must be idiots with the attention span of a goldfish. - you know some of these guys had a bricked phone for a number of days, you would have thought that one of them would have had the sense to plug it into the wall
The fact of the matter is that U-boot did not play well with a pre-installed multiboot and folks could not load a kernel, and yes most of the people I discussed this with tried pretty much everything including your suggestion to get the battery charged, all of them had to get it charged externaly.
From my observations, I believe that some part of the kernel must be loaded before the device can charge - try it yourself, turn off the phone, plug it in and watch as the 5 dots appear before it starts charging.