Wrong timings for controlling APA106 LED's using the neopixel Library

Glad you got it sorted!

from 141414 which is 20 to 282828

That's twice as much so I imagine either a bit of data got lost or an extra one was found. Could it be that there was a lot of voltage loss down the string of LEDs or something like that?

It's a bit of a worry that someone would be selling a LED strip that just doesn't work reliably :(

I seem to recall that some of these LED chips actually recreate the signal they get - so after the first LED the pulse lengths will get reset to the correct levels.

I had to add the SPI2 setup to make it work in the first place

That's odd - were you using SPI for something else in your project too? When I tested here it all seemed to work fine without needing to call setup separately.