figured by writing the wetek play 2 img.gz on the stick instead of the box version. what i suspect is that the box thought that the sdcard contains the exact same system, why would i boot from sdcard. but that doesn't sound very real.. anyway this way i could boot from sdcard, could wget the correct img file, and could run emmctool w libreelec11.img.gz and it's all good now.
That sounds like the wrong way around. Android (vendor) u-boot will not boot the WP2 image as it doesn't understand any of the extlinux boot files. If you boot from the box image which has boot.scr and s905_autoscript etc. it should boot. Unless somehow you broke/erased vendor u-boot; then the WP2 image on SD will boot as vendor u-boot on eMMC doesn't exist. Either way.. glad you got there in the end.