Reconnected everything & there was obviously a major malfunction.

There's either a dead board, broken wire, or a contaminated connector.  The LCD was only driven 1 way instead of oscillating.  There were bad columns on 1 side while the other side had good columns.  Maybe it could be fixed by checking the voltages, cleaning the connectors or buzzing out a broken wire. The mane problem was the awful backlight.  Another $30 for PLA diffusers might make it even, bringing it to $70.  Not sure why it had 3 bright bands instead of 16.  

The bottom end 32" TV is the $130 1366*768 Sansui.  Realistically, as a picture frame, such a drop in resolution wouldn't matter.  The lion kingdom is just going to abandon the picture frame instead of buy a TV though.

Anyways, the raspberry pi was underclocked to 400Mhz.  It was a lot slower to update this 24 bit 2560x1600 display than 50Mhz UNIX boxes were at updating an 8 bit 1280x1024 display, 30 years ago.  

The internet no longer seems to know how to remotely connect to an X server.  The X server on raspberry pi's is run with -nolisten tcp which causes it to ignore all connections besides the console.  Removing this argument makes it work, but the lion kingdom ended up having to delete lightdm & run X from the command line.