Thanks Juha,
Sorry about the typo, Kamailio needs to add Record-Route header to INVITE and then it will route ACK based on Route header.
Of course. It does mean that I am dependent on the proxy; and so, that I might also choose to route any ACK messages with !uri==myself. I'll play with these options a little. Clearly, you are suggesting that a proxy may well relay ACK messages.
Meanwhile, I'm wondering if Contact: headers as stored for follow-ups like ACK and REFER shouldn't always point to a SIP host (phone), so that I might need to add DNS for host-resolution only (no SRV). That would be a mild complication (mostly adding concurrency) that I could consider.
-Rick