Thanks to @HestiaPi and @hestia_hacker,
My LCD is now reacting correctly to touch events. When I found the post Third party LCD calibration - swapped axes I realized that was exactly the problem I was having (however my 99-calibration.conf was located in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/, matching the Manual Installation wiki, not the path in the post).
As for it not working in my 3B+, is may be an SD compatibility issue. When I put it in the 3B+, all that happens is the power (red) LED blinks. The LED flash on twice, stays on for a moment, then goes into a loop of 4 flashes followed by 3 quick flashes and then stays on for a moment before repeating. I haven’t found a definitive meaning for this in my web searches.
Also, the country code in the wpa_supplicant file does not keep things from working. I’m just pointing out that it means that the wifi is operating under the wrong country’s regulations - though honestly I don’t know what the implications of that are.
When my system hung, it was after the reboot when it should connect to my network. Actually i can’t say if it had successfully connected to my network as it was already in my DHCP server from booting previous images. It may have connected or not, I just know that after awhile it was not present in my network (at least at the IP assigned by DHCP). With no activity and no network, I thought it safe to kill and reapply the power (it was well after a couple of minutes).
So at this point it is running on my bench hooked up to some relays but not connected to anything. I can click through the various settings and the info screen and see the relays going on and off. Though I’m getting the feeling that some aspects of the UI are not working correctly.
What I’m seeing (and my observations are not in great depth; also please let me know if I’ve gone too off topic and should start a new post), and gleaning from a brief look at the html and javascript, is that there should possibly be animated images when the HVAC is running (such as heat or fan). In my case the icons just disappear when running and come back when stopped. Also I noticed references to .vue files in the javascript but find no files with that extension on my system. I don’t think this is just a problem with the @hestia_hacker build, as I saw the same behavior with the 1.2 dev build (I could never get the 1.1 release to work because it seemed to want to load files from some dead URLs).
If someone could point me to some background to understand how the UI is implemented or what it should look and act like in operation, I would appreciate it.