Administrator lost TV tab in resources

During the process of setting permissions for lower level users somehow I've lost the template variables tab in all the resources when logged in as admin. I didn't even change Administrator permissions. I'm still trying to figure out security. Can someone point me in the right direction to correct this problem?

Try just adding the admin to every User Group with a role of Super User. Flush permissions and flush all sessions.

Assuming that you haven't used Form Customization and haven't changed any of the admin's permissions, that's very likely to solve the problem.

If it works, here's why (probably): you added template variables to either a protected resource group or a protected category and created an ACL entry connecting that group or category to a user group. That made the TVs protected and inaccessible for anyone outside the group. Since the admin wasn't in the user group, you protected them from the admin. Adding the admin to the user group gave the admin access to them again.