Autopilot Deployment Profile Assignment Issue

Recently I came across an issue with Autopilot Deployment Profile assignment which took some time to debunk. Long story short, for the existing devices I wanted the hashes to be imported automatically - via the option 'Convert all targeted devices to Autopilot' to save some time. I assigned the profile to two groups:

1. a dynamic group via groupTag - this made sense as the hardware vendor is allowed to add the computer hashes to Intune, so makes life easier
2. another dynamic group, but this time, the dynamic rule matched the device names e.g. starts with the 3 letter site-. E.g. NYC-<1A3B4CE>

All good, hashes start arriving on the next sync, and I wait patiently... and wait some more. And the devices aren't getting the profile assigned to them. Which at first I found weird, as the deployment profile itself was the one that imported the hashes in the first place - surely they are applying, right? All my existing devices sit in that dynamic group with the the rule 'name startswith NYC-' match.

Yes... with the name starts with match. Of course, the imported hash - which is just the serial itself, isn't matching in that group, so the resulting object isn't member of the 2nd dynamic group. But it also isn't the member of the 1st one, since neither of them has a group tag yet...

Doh... that's exactly why I did it to avoid having to add the groupTags... Note to myself: write a mail requesting the feature to bulk-edit groupTags... 😥