Bad hardware / bootloader problem on banglejs 2?

Yes, it's a pain but since all the hardware is always powered, it's pretty much the only fix for anything outside of the CPU :(

Or will toggling everything be substantially more power draw?

It should be at least double... The backlight is a huge power hog, but so is GPS :)

In retrospect, the grays really are strange aren't they?

Yes! If we could figure out how to get that to happen reliably it'd make a lot of people very happy!

The greys can happen as kind of a 'ghosting' effect where you get (temporary) burn-in if a certain wire to the LCD isn't toggled often enough, but I'm not entirely sure that's the issue here.