Some good news, I played around with the device and the loader and found that things work "as they did" if I follow the instructions more carefully... press and hold the button UNTIL LOADING IS FINISHED! ;) It says it there but I didn't quite understand I had to hold it down the whole time.
Anyhow... it works and gets to "Running on mt62xx in environment mtkram and HW_CODE = 0x6235" So I am back at square one with this small Makefile.mtk change and will proceed with experiments on bringing up sciphone and/or fernvale and friends.
Thanks Craig