I will finally have the dead phone in my hands tomorrow, so that I can finally do all these experiments.
I was referring to the "keep pressing clean cache" once in recovery:
I remember it didn't enter recovery, only sometimes. Everytime I'm in recovery I have to try to press clear cache right?
Also, I remember it didn't charge neither, because at the charging animation it used to crash and bootloop. Did yours charge normally with the entire charging animation?
Because charging is part of kernel, and if kernel doesn't finish boot neither can correctly show charging animation.
One more thing: did kies put latest lollipop or instead kitkat?