All,

A colleague pointed out:

I don't think Qt 5.6 would have helped in this case. The root cause was that the source code was referencing a plugin before the qt.conf file was loaded. The loading of the qt.conf file is what has been set up to tell the application where to find the Qt libraries. Since the qt.conf file was not loaded yet, it was unable to determine where the plugin was and erred out. This would still be the case even with a newer version of Qt.

Is that true? Does Qt 5.6 address this issue?