I need a refresher on this. I moved a site from cf to lucee (5.3.8.206), and upon doing so, all my serializejson responses have original case instead of being forced to upper case (which is what I want). my code is straight-forward, I perform a query and serializejson the response. I verified the server language/compiler setting, "Convert to upper case" which is checked on.

Make sure this is set in the web context, or at least the web context isn't overwriting your server context. Ben Nadel has a good blog post on this that's great at explaining the various options : https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3667-understanding-struct-key-casing-using-serializejson-in-lucee-5-3-2-77.htm

none of those options seem to be working for me

Interesting. do you have the same issue with structs? :

<cfscript>
processingDirective preserveCase = true; // false
a={Hello: 'World'};
dump(a);
</cfscript>

each time I made an update it didn't seem to work, but then this morning, the problem went away.. so one of those changes must have worked 🙂 thank you for your time.