That’s the wiki article I’ve used during setup, I’ve probably read it top to bottom 10 times (or so I thought). Reading it again I see almost verbatim the sentence I suggested above, so it seems I’m blind!
“If you get strange values using the int32, uint32 or float32 valuetypes then just try the int32_swap, uint32_swap or float32_swap valuetype, depending upon what your data type is.”
Has that always been there!?!? I swear, I’m not always this stupid. Like you said, simple errors - if it were just swapped bytes or wrong endian-ness on their own, I would have figured it out in a couple seconds, but when they combined I went down a rabbit hole thinking I was nuts. It doesn’t help that reading a float value with the wrong endian and a register error of +1, it gets the MSB and gives you a value that looks like it’s basically correct. Lucky me 