UPDATE: I am an idiot (acutally, that's not much of an update but whatever). Apparently I'd put the carrier.nut file in the modules folder of 2.3.0 a long time ago and forgot about it. All this time I thought it was loading from the scripts folder ... nope... the reason it works out of the box on the ARpiCADE is because Dee2er, the ARpiCADE guy puts that carrier module in the modules folder for their release...
SO, now i get to figure out how to force the layout to load the script from the layouts scripts folder... and then update those modules.
Until then, all anyone who wants to get those layouts to work has to do is copy the carrier.nut file from the scripts folder to the modules folder.
My apologies for the confusion.
Yes... I am a hack.