I understand the recidive settings in fail2ban are hardcoded. I changed the values in jail.local only to have my edits overwritten next time I restarted fail2ban.
The ‘persistance’ is of f2b’s acquired knowledge, it adds chains to ip tables based on that knowledge, , absent that knowledge, it can add nothing until the same guy shows up again or is in the watched log file which is likely less than 24hours old . If you move to >=0.9 it is stored in an sqlite3 database so the chains can be rebuilt on a restart and the lig file is only read from ‘latest ddate’
I can’t answer that as I don’t use it, so I would suggest that you just wait patiently for Sangoma either explain their thinking or get off the pot and update it.