Getting started in the hobby is a learning journey. It's the little things. I was able to solve my plate solving issue, and maybe the following helps somebody in the future:

• Increasing gain. For some reason I had set it to 0, yielding too few stars for the solve. Setting it to >200 greatly increased that count.
• Not narrowing down the initial solve to the reported coordinates from the mount. I have a mobile setup and only crudely align to north.