Brightness:
Update, although the code hasn't changed the Brightness/Dimming of the display "does work" but only by GUI slider (which can't reach 0% or off).
During day light I also had a external display attached which fake dimmed using DDC (OSD on that external display remained at same brightness while picture got darker...) since I was not able to get the built-in screen 0% dark/off with slider (it does turn off with keyboard shortcut or timer) I had mistaken that brightness control was not working at all... But visually reaffirming and checking via power metering outlet I verified the screen gets off/darker/brighter. It uses around ~4,5 Watt full on and can be dimmed as low as ~1 Watt, or off 0 Watt. The fn-keyboard button to toggle disable/enable screen also works, only brightness up an down (fn left/right keys) won't work!
I also forgot to the check the LID open/close status but the current code does not expose that to the OS as an option (what to do while if LID closes).
Accu/Battery LID:
Doing a egrep -r -i NPCE in the src/mainboard folder hinted me of maybe a related notebook src/mainboard/51nb/x210/ although a newer skylake model which relies on a ec.bin file I tried to hack copy/paste some ec/acpi code of that NPCE985 together. Although I don't have a ec.bin it gave me a LID function albeit broken (false reports it is closed) and it broke brightness functions maybe its just a lead for the battery? Still have to upload that patch.
ExpressCard Hotplug:
One other issue mentioned was that ExpressCard with a e-SATA chipset won't hotplug while other cards with ethernet, firewire or USB3 chipsets doe work fine after hotplugging. Will gather some lspci/dmesg logs about those specific 3 e-SATA cards soon.
e-SATA hotplug:
Don't mistake this with previous issue, but does Ivy Bridge does have a similar parameter like Sky Lake to enable sata hotplug?