My prior posting was tagged “resolved” (not sure why), but I am still at a loss as to what’s going on here with the primitives and the fact that they are “unpaintable”. There are more ZB users then just myself that do use them and have since the earlier versions. At least an explanation would be helpful as to why this changed in ZB or if it will be corrected or not.
I did a uv check on the primitive sphere and then flattened it in UV Master to illustrate this: 
I found a temporary solution via MODO and decreasing the UVs 99.93 percent thru just fooling around with it for hours. Eventually I got the same fix in Blender, but this extra work is less then ideal. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?