Three main issues:
1) The 0x13 special case section in write data in ncs36510_i2c.c didn't have a write++ command.
2) In the same write function, the WDAT8 command was put before the 0x13 section and this is not correct
3) Needed to add wait_us(0) before and after the register writes for apparent clock domain crossing delay times until registers are stable in HW
There were also a handful of other tweaks related to general code maintenance and moving some status register checks to the proper locations.