The submodule had been pointing at a local MeshCore commit that included
all 5 patches applied on top of upstream. That commit only exists in the
local working tree — CI's `submodules: recursive` checkout couldn't
fetch it from github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore and failed with
"fatal: not our ref d2ad3ac8".
Resets vendor/MeshCore to upstream main (910b1bee, the same base our
patches were authored against) so CI can fetch it normally, and adds an
explicit `apply-patches.sh` step to the firmware-build workflow before
the verify and build steps run. The release workflow already applies
patches explicitly so no change there.
Subsequent verify/build steps set MESHCORE_SKIP_APPLY_PATCHES=1 to avoid
re-applying patches on the now-dirty tree.
Bundles in-progress utility commands (TIME, LORA, ID, NEIGHBORS), neighbor
tracking, received_at_timestamp / personalized acks, and per-hop response
delay coordination. Tunes the coordinator so multi-hop senders actually get
responses: hop step 5s→1.5s, hop bias capped at 8s, pending TTL 15s→45s.
Verified on Heltec V3 bench bot: responds to #bot at 2, 4, and 6 hops.
BOT_PREFS_VERSION bumped 2→3, so existing bots will reset bot prefs (channel
names, known bots) to defaults on first boot of this firmware.
