[T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S II SGH-T989] RealPariah:
OK, I got more info. You have to WAIT. First I figured out the flash order has to be ROM zip, gapps, then new kernel, doing kernel before gapps causes an issue where it soft reboots (during boot animation) and gets stuck (boot animation just keeps doing it's thing and never fully boots).

For mobile data it flips on and off and during this time you will see that error (most the time it occasionally lists APNs during this time). If you WAIT it will flip on and off with ! and you swear there's a problem, but each time I just locked screen and WAITED (I know it's hard to do ain't it) eventually it connected at some point and I was good.

You ARE ABLE TO HURRY THIS BY CONNECTING TO A WI-FI NETWORK FULLY, but if you wait at least for me 3 times back to back after roughly 3-5m it finally connected without me touching anything.

---------- Post added at 12:41 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:10 AM ----------

It gets weirder ...

After this clean install I chose I restore 27 of 29 apps and after a couple downloads market stopped downloading them (still lists them as updating in my apps just nothing happens (this has happened before and force closing market and clearing cache and opening market again usually corrects this right well...) I tried that this time except it would not stop calculating space so I ended up restarting and usually still hero's updating this time nothing was listed in apps and market FC'd. I was testing mobile data so I restarted again and this time all of a sudden it started doing dalvick cache generation for ALL apps (listing not only system apps already done on initial boot (I think took 10m for boot animation to clear but didn't see usual cache gen animation and screen) but also all my apps) BUT after boot only the couple apps that originally restored were listed and now market is finally downloading my restore apps even though I checked market my apps and they weren't listed on a previous boot. As stated I did flash new kernel during clean flash and never have seen this behavior before. I have all partitions aside from system and external micro SD set to F2FS system and micro are ext4 (couldn't format micro originally or would have lost ROM zip, but will eventually do micro (I know not to do system).

I hope you can follow all that it not only was weird to see all this as I have had boot logo only for 10m after flash with no other issue and have had dalvick cache gen happen after installing apps (where boot logo drops to cache gen animation and lists only new downloads (AS IT SHOULD I know that)). It is just hard to aptly explain all that.

Also, it is com.Google.Android.gms and not gsm that much about earlier note I can also confirm.

I am starting to wonder if Chet's TWRP is not somehow fully formatting partitions (as TWRP has seemed to do before in distant past to me) so apps might still be there but maybe lollipop has more of an index or DB and if that doesn't have app data then even though they exist it doesn't list them in app drawer or market (I know market has an index or DB that links apps to their market listing maybe they expanded that) but typing that bit makes me that maybe this is all linked to a similar problem ...

My thought possibly the mobile APN and this market issue highlight a user and/or file permissions issue all around tying both the mobile APN error we're seeing and this market/app issue together with the dalvick cache generation of unseen "ghost" apps issue somewhere in the backend of things hhhmmmm interesting.