In parallel, I'm trying to find out why the antenna on the BGA design didn't work.

Contacted the Nordic dev help, and had a few extremely nice and knowledgeable engineers give me very constructive feedback.

In short, Nordic reached out to me and offered to optimize my antenna design in-house in their lab in Oslo. The only thing I need to do is mail to Norway the designs with some extra work to allow them to access the MCU. I was extremely impressed by the level of customer service. Such attention to details is rare these days. I'll take them up the offer once I finalize my case design.

Hats of to the Nordic engineers, thank you, and looking forward to learning from you.