Unlike a traditional bios/eufi system I'm still trying to wrap my head around the entire boot process. I really don't like when things work via back magic... but for now I'm willing to let that slide as I search for more answers.
Right now I would love to find out why /dev/mmcblk0p2 doesn't have an entry in fstab? Can it forgo the an entry due to the flags in /boot/cmdline.txt?