It's not a question of what challenge we request to use, it's a question of what challenges Let's Encrypt sends back to our request when we submit the csr. It doesn't always match what we requested. It will always include a dns challenge for a wildcard certificate, even if we request an http challenge. In the case where I requested a wildcard and the non-subdomain certificate, it was sending back a dns challenge for the wildcard and an http challenge for the domain root, even if I submitted the signing request with auth/acmed -t dns. The hybrid means "I don't know what the signer is going to request, so figure it out when I get the challenge."