@Fluxty,
Excellent write up – even went the extra mile to include details/summary of debug info as to not have a gigantic post? 
It’s worth noting that there seems to be a misunderstanding with respect to expectations when it comes to Brave Ads. To better highlight this, consider this section from our Ads FAQ on Help Center regarding the way in which the system finds and matches you with ads in the catalog:
If they’re not tracking me, how does it know what ads to serve that are “relevant” to me?
In traditional advertising, when a user navigates to a web page, a series of calls are made to an ad server that include information about you and your behavior. This, and other data, is shared with third parties that profile users and use that data to target you with ads. Brave’s approach is very different. Instead of having the user’s data leak from the device to the cloud, Brave’s ad server sends an Ads Catalog to all Brave Rewards users that includes a list of all available ads.
The browser uses local machine learning to determine the best time and opportunity to present an ad, and matches an ad from the catalog based on the content and intent of the user. Ads are matched locally to the most complete and direct data set, your browsing profile You end up with ads that are actually relevant to your experience.
I’ve bolded the most relevant parts above.
The reason I bring this up is that there’s a good chance that ads are working – but there simply isn’t a match for you at this time. That said, @Fluxty, 4 days is a fairly long time to not receive a single ad – but again, this may not point to a bug so much as a lack of relevant data (according to the algorithm).
In addition, note that “Maximum Ads per hour” does not equate to “you will see X ads each hour” – it is a ceiling, not a floor. That is, the most you can elect to see per hour is 5 – meaning that the range is 0 – 5 ads per hour.
If you’d like to try an additional test, I’d recommend downloading our Beta or Developer builds and enabling ads to see if the behavior is any different.
