After posting a question about a new camera, I get two helpful posts overnight on tips to fix the problem.
The QHY SDK solved the problem.
dmesg now shows
[ 103.863057] usb 1-1.1: new high-speed USB device number 6 using xhci_hcd
[ 103.963684] usb 1-1.1: New USB device found, idVendor=1618, idProduct=c296, bcdDevice= 1.00
[ 103.963703] usb 1-1.1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 103.963716] usb 1-1.1: Product: WestBridge
[ 103.963727] usb 1-1.1: Manufacturer: Cypress
[ 103.963738] usb 1-1.1: SerialNumber: 0000000004BE
[ 104.149295] usb 1-1.1: USB disconnect, device number 6
[ 104.295278] usb 2-1: new SuperSpeed Gen 1 USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[ 104.316193] usb 2-1: LPM exit latency is zeroed, disabling LPM.
[ 104.317142] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=1618, idProduct=c297, bcdDevice= 0.00
[ 104.317156] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[ 104.317168] usb 2-1: Product: QHY294SPV200917
[ 104.317179] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: QHYCCD
and the camera is recognized in ekos.
So I used the astropi3 script on a arm64 distro and thought everything went fine. Turns out realvnc doesn't natively support arm64 without significant modifications... so I just installed tightvnc... but then i had to modify the vnc startup script to work properly... with flexibility comes challenges.
a few steps closer to getting this all to work again...