Yet more oddities:
after manualling recaptioning, some figures didn't appear available to select as cross references: it seems those were embedded strangely (text flow around those was different)...I re-inserted them "normally" (and re-captioned them) to resolve this issue.

But I next inserted a Table of Figures and several are missing! This includes those ones I had to manually re-insert and I think a few more.

HOW CAN THIS BE? How is this fixed?