[Verizon Galaxy Note 3 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] bftb0:
unlocked bootloader == developer edition.

Having a "DevEd" device means that the bootloader will no long prevent you from booting unsigned "bootable" partitions (boot and recovery). And, also that Odin no longer requires things flashed in the AP slot such as boot.img, recovery.img, and system.img to be Samsung signed.

The implications is that the "Retail" version of Jasmine is required to use the pure stock boot image, and no custom recovery, whereas the DevEd version can do one or both. Small mods of the boot.img blob are the most likely.

Noting that the "boot.img" binary blob is actually three separate pieces:

boot.img = kernel + ramdisk + devicetree

I can't tell you if the DevEd version of Jasmine modifies the stock kernel, the ramdisk, or the device treee (or any combination thereof). Intuition tells me that mods of the devicetree are highly unlikely and small mods of the ramdisk are the most likely. Is the kernel modded? I don't know, you'll have to dig into that thread to find out.

Practically speaking, having only a single boot which is rooted is a bit of a hazard, but it is far more of a hazard if the bootloader is still locked. If that one boot/ROM started boot-looping after a broken modification by the owner, the only recourse is to go back to pure stock using Odin and start re-rooting. With an unlocked bootloader, in principle you could install a custom recovery (flashing it with Odin) at any time, so a 2nd independent, rooted custom boot/recovery is available to perform system maintenance.

So you can use either the DevEd version or the Retail version on an unlocked phone. Probably you should dig in to the Jasmine thread to find out if the differences between the two are compelling to you based on whatever it is you want your phone to do.

good luck

PS. See this very nearly identical inquiry & reply in the Q&A Forum, especially the remarks about "partial firmware flashing". You do not want to over-flash your unlocked bootloader.

---------- Post added at 11:23 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:08 PM ----------

What is known for sure is that the Samsung bootloader (which is actually a whole slew of partitions) enforces an Anti-Rollback policy on the bootloader firmware.

It is actually not known if it would be possible to run a 4.3.x or 4.4.x stock ROM on later versions of bootloader firmware. For instance, if your bootloader firmware was OB6 or OF1 ("5.x") but you flashed stock versions of NC4/NK1 ROM software (4.4.x "boot.img" and "system.img")

Why is it not known? Because AFAIK, no-one has tried it. (Well, actually [MENTION=766721]ryanbg[/MENTION] tried all sorts of dangerous flashing combinations in the old days, but I'm not sure if he published the details). I suspect it would be safe to try these experiments (clean flash of only boot.img and system.img from prior releases) - if and only if you have an unlocked bootloader. (If they don't work, flash something that does; hard to imagine they will cause a hard-bricking on what is a DevEd phone).

So it is probably most accurate to say "we can't flash OB6 or OF1 bootloader firmware back to NC4", but "it's not known if OB6/OF1 bootloader would successfully boot 4.4.x (or even 4.3.x) ROMs" (boot.img + system.img)

I hope that's not too confusing. It's a little subtle, but makes far more sense to anyone who realizes that there are a ton of partitions in these Samsung phones, and that "4.3", "4.4", "5.0" are more closely associated with boot.img and system.img than they are with the (many) bootloader partitions.