Most probably the AltAzMount identifies your mount as Virtuoso mount (as it does with my 10" Dob), and the driver expect Virtuoso mounts to be turned on pointing to the Polaris instead of horizontal/north. The AltAzSimple expects the mount to be horizontal/north at the time of connecting the driver.
So if you have connected the AltAzMount driver in a horizontal position (as one would do normally), that cause a big initial error in the mount model in the driver, which explains your inability to correct it with sync operations.
I see reason for both starting from pointing to the Polaris, and pointing horizontal. IMHO there should be an option for that somewhere for that, let the user choose. It does not sound too difficult to implement, maybe I will do that soon.

The AltAzMount driver has a built in procedure for unparking, only the original author of the driver knows why. There is an option on a "motion control" or "mount cotnrol" (I cant check now, as my mount is not with me now), where you can choose the unpark position (North, Shouth, etc...). The default is South, I have no idea, why. If you set that to North, the mount will not turn in azimuth after unpark. It will still raise in Alt, as far as I can tell, this is hard coded in the driver. What I do is I hit "abort motion" immediatelly after unpark, to stop this built in thing. Also there is an option, on the same panel for "silent"/"normal" slew mode. You can choose as you wish, silent mode is slow, normal mode is as fast as the mount can do.

The motor microstep per rew values are read from from the mount, it should be correct. It seems to be correct both for my little Virtuoso mount and the big Dobsonian one too. It is on the "Version" tab, i think.

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