Turns out, this is an issue with how the box saves boot parameters.
I removed the coreelec usb drive and set the right preferences - i.e. don’t start with dolby vision enabled and then i rebooted the homatics box.
After that I reinserted the coreelec usb drive (while in android) and just rebooted the box - and what do you know it booted correctly (without the white screen).
So, while the newer kernels in ne and no are able to initialize the output of the box at boot time even while in the DV state, configuring the box properly mitigates this!