Well, thank you Mike for spotting this. We shall look forward to hearing your progress with the new driver. As for AP, we did approach them on writing an SOP for KStars using the existing driver and they seem somewhat encouraging.
I am still not certain why we have had such good luck with the existing driver, but, I do know we never Sync unless we absolutely have to. Our SOP is always been to allow KStars to slew to the target, both, initially and using astrometry. Perhaps, our large FOV is allowing us the luxury of being almost a visual observer and our targets were small enough the problem seldom manifested itself. In any event, more accuracy is never a bad thing, especially, if we can solve faster.
Finally had a clear night and the function I suggested earlier in this thread seems to handle the SYNC problem I was seeing. I was able to have the Alignment module in Ekos use the "Slew to target" method and get to within a few arc-seconds of the requested RA/DEC.
It looks like this code has been rolled into the master branch now so I think this is resolved.