OK, I do have another phone that is doing the same thing (nothing). Thanks for the tip there, I am kinda ashamed I didnt think of that.
As for bluestacks, I cannot even try that as its a Windows only product and I use linux (Red Hat Enterprise 7.2 to be exact).
Now I have regone thru the logs on the older (second) phone, and I literally see nothing that shows things arent working. the account that I setup was a stab in the dark with DavDriod’s automated detection which properly figured out (according to the logs) the Calendar and Contacts URLs and said it sync’ed them, and mentioned something about various types of entries being processed. But zero errors.