Your experience doesn’t sound right. You mind opening a GitHub issue?
Explaining your experience and provide crash.log with debug logs?
There should be no difference between the devices that nickel sees and what koreader sees. As they both use the same dbus command to get the devices.
Or you’re potentially running into:
https://github.com/OGKevin/kobo.koplugin/issues/44 if this device auto connects.
But also:
https://www.reddit.com/r/koreader/s/EvnwTCSlyJ