@donshakespeare I placed the snippet immediately after the opening <body>.
There was a typo in my custom outerTpl that was part of the problem. The content is now being carried over to the NP form, though a lot of my custom styling went right out the window in the process. Something else to add to the list.
So, the content is present but the only fields that respond to editing are pagetitle, description, and introtext. None of the additional/custom fields (picker, text-field, textarea, file upload) update. No errors are thrown on submit, the page redirects back to the article sans changes.
[ed. note: todd.b last edited this post 11 years, 8 months ago.]