It's not just you...all of us seem to suffer from slightly different symptoms when booting. My LEDs don't come on often if I boot with my headlights off, but a quick flick of my headlights will make them come on...the recovery from standby is not something I've explicitly tried..anyway, as soon as I get some time I'm intending to rework the button LED code to try and get the boot-up to be more robust.

The jump from 6 to max is by design. There's only 8 states, 0-6 and max. This limitation is because there is very little flash memory available for storing the level at shutdown. (Again, an issue to be looked at - at the moment there is no distinction between home and car modes for button LEDs.)