Well, that as interesting.
IO found the problem, at least in my universe. ;-) I'm using a Mac and whenever I launch Godot, I get the Firewall warning below. I've never seen this dialog before and am new to Godot, so IO've instinctively been hitting the Deny button on it. On a whim, I hit Allow and now the problem with Inspector property values being used by script instances is magically gone.
Go figure.
