I've been thinking about this tonight (even checked the thread)
The canbus systems I have worked on (extensively - can send logs) are 29bit and apart from a race condition between my mcu and the phone module which was won by beating it to the punch I just used diag commands to do what I needed.
So, probably worth exploring those, there must be 'activations' for most things via factory tools for testing.
Actually I also auto enabled cruise control that was done by setting the correct bit not diag command, again different platform but it worked.
I have, as mentioned seen oddities with different mcu's like bit timing, etc too. Mostly it just worked, but chipkit, for example I couldn't get to work @ 125k for sending when 500k would work, frames looked identical like you are saying too.
I feel your pain
