[Nook HD, HD+ Android Development] amaces:
That kind of instability is not normal, at least on my ovation variant; is the 06/11 build behaving similarly? This commit should also make for a marginally different touch experience, although not with respect to phantom touches. I haven't had those in quite a while.

You've discovered one of our holy trinity of major bugs :( I estimate a dozen hours wasted on the mic capture bug with little success… My intuition about the source of the problem is changing as I learn more about the interplay between kernel, the audio glue, and CM's AudioPolicy kit. I definitely know that Voice Search has gotten worse, while the Hangouts Dialer never worked. It makes moderate sense since they should be using different audio capture sinks. Have you tried a wired headset, or even better, a decent Bluetooth one?

Ditto, see above. Believe me, we tried, and even made decent progress (e.g., audio works now). Screen casting is pretty complicated, and I'm still unsure if CM, AOSP, or the OMAP video sub-system is the culprit. Maybe look for an app that can Chromecast from the cloud, because that definitely works.

The former has been mentioned here a couple of times, but could never replicate it. The battery level stuff would be a deal breaker, but I don't think anyone mentioned it before. Bottomline, it'll be tough giving any useful feedback before I can replicate either of those…

Totally possible, VPN has been broken even in stock AOSP several times before. What flavor (e.g., IPsec, PPTP, etc), and has it ever worked with a previous CM version?

The changes in that boot image have been integrated in the 06/11 build, so I took out redundant stuff; the current builds are the best we have :( Have you tried Chrome Dev? Its rendering seems somewhat less broken than the stable version.

If the tablet says that USB debugging is working, chances are that the problem lies with the ADB client (i.e., *Ubuntu). Maybe USB mass storage or MTP mode interferes with ADB, although I doubt that. I recall both working with the ADB shell on OS X, and Linux has similar drivers; maybe try a different client setup, god forbid, Windows?

Every time you flash a new CM ROM, /system is wiped, except the few files that have have addon.d support (e.g., SuperSU, GApps, etc). I'm also using Xposed (with Greenify, and Amplify), and flash it basically with every ROM update. I guess you could simplify your life with something like this, but remembering to flash an additional ZIP seems easy enough right now.

Oh, no K3.4 anytime soon, given that no one has gotten it past the point of an ADB connection on the HDs… I've seen some promising signs with certain kernel configurations, but the only way to find the bottleneck is to open the Nook, and connect directly to serial console. Fortunately, I have the USB/UART TTL cable from the days of OpenWrt testing, so it may happen eventually.

At this point, I'm only hoping that Hashcode is slowly switching all legacy OMAP devices over to Lollipop/CM12, using the upstream sources. While I definitely like my additions, the three major bugs (HW overlay/underflows, garbled mic capture, and no video with screen casting) still remain from the early CM12 days… At any rate, as our official maintainer, he'll decide when things are ready for official nightlies. In the meantime, I'll try to provide weekly builds, at the very least ;)