Good day all--
Earlier, I had written about the unreliability of adding a table-line.  Well, I ran into a similar problem with the (significantly simpler) entry capability.  Unlike the table-line, this was an easier debug and I determined that org-note-abort was set to t which ensures capture will always fail.
While I don't know exactly how I did it, I suspect it was something like the following:* edit a template, test it and find it isn't quite what you want* make an (incorrect) change that sets breaks on insertion, sets org-note-abort to t and you're stuck until you reset it to nil by hand (remarkably, I've had to do the same thing with inhibit-trace as well).
Searching the mailing list and looking at Google hasn't been any more illuminating on this.  It's important to note that while org-capture-kill sets org-note-abort to t, it's reset correctly when used in the normal way.
Version: 9.1.7
Thx and I'm guessing something similar happened with the table-line issue.
--Brad