@ScruffR, I can report that a Photon module with headers sitting on a prototyping bread board works fine with SoftAP (Android mobile and iPad) , whereas soldered to my PCB doesn’t.
So there seems to be some subtle ** hardware issue **, most likely the radio because signal strength is excellent, but DHCP is not working when sitting or soldered to PCB.
Am going to enable the new logger functionality so that we may trace the system messages within setup() and compare a good outcome with a bad. Back soon!