Before posting on this, though, I at least did the due diligence to investigate these discrepencies more fully. After installing devel/mercurial and fetching the real current onnv sources, I see that the diffs are much more useful and obvious than they were previously.
Sigh-- a bumpy start, indeed. I'm almost finished moving. I'm very excited to dive into this and get to nuts & bolts & code. Though, I'm still a little bit disoriented (in more ways than SoC, certainly), I am working hard to get my bearings and make some quantifiable progress.