I do have COMPAT_NETBSD32 because it's on by default in the netbsd-7 kernel config.
I wasn't paying that much attention to the ABI stuff on this list, and I tried to go back and research it. It seems as though you need to know something more than what NetBSD documentation shows (or what I can easily search on) to know what ABI any particular arm machine is using. Or if it can use multiple. I also saw that someone requested this to be documented in earlier posts.
So for now I know that I should be using netbsd-earm, so I will try that. I should be able to go back and use netbsd-arm and recreate the userland crashes if that remains an issue.