also, verify all 3 first bytes of SPI commands. I'm not sure why
I wasn't doing that, probably because I was getting a lot of AVR
err and thought that only 2 bytes of the cmd were echoed. But now,
with a reliable SPI setup, verifying 3 bytes seems to work.
After many trials and errors in reliably accessing AVR chips through
my SPI relay design, I resigned myself to accepting 125kHz communication
speed with it. I find the complexity of solutions allowing to keep 250kHz
speeds to be excessive.