Is there a reason why these miners don't have asicboost enabled?
That's pretty much the same as throwing away 10% of your hash rate you'd get for the same power.
Because its not implemented in the ASIC obviously.
Incorrect.
It turns out these miners can do asicboost.
You need to add the option "-roll_version"
However, the miner code has a bug in it that sends incorrect version data regularly so you lose lotsa shares.
I've put a hack into my pool to correct the bad data so you don't lose the shares/blocks

So solo mining on my pool with an apollo can use asicboost with the "-roll_version" option.