I think I have fallen victim to your warning about starting template formatting work in a previously used document.

Would you say that I should perform a tactical retreat and recreate my first template from the normaldot template and then copy that template for any variations I will have?

Even so, I am still running into funky things like changing a style used in a table in a header and it also creates another table instead of simply changing the font style.

(I am becoming increasingly fonder of FrameMaker with each day I work with Word.)