I came across a thread previously on this same issue with respect to openwrt.
I tried to change the routing algo following tweaking section of batman wiki as soon as loading the batman_adv module.
I am able to see BATMAN_V under availabile algorithms but available for next instance of batx. I understand it has to be done before this bat0 interface is created, but I am doing this before bringing up bat0 using ifconfig
batctl 2016.4 batman-adv 2016.4