Because str{strv} will be a single character and equal to 'N' assuming the string 'Num_X=' is in the text in the first line; otherwise it'll be whatever character happens to be in that position in the line. fgetl returns a character array; subscripting it with a single index returns only a single character, not a full string as does a reference to a cell string. Of course, str2double and friends aren't cellstring aware.
textscan is probably a better approach to reading the file; let's see a small subset of the file format...
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