I re-installed grub and now it boots through the grub menu to the point of handing off to the linux kernel. The linux kernel stalls stone cold dead in either direct from firmware or pass through grub mode.
So I think Grub is 97.6% exonerated at this point. This is my standard kernel.org pure vanilla 4.6.7 kernel, the obvious EFI config variables have been set... No idea, will be trolling the ##linux channel for the next few hours... -- Strange Game. The only winning move is not to play. Powers are not rights.