I spent a little time after my last post this morning and was able to get everything working. What I had to do was find the location of the “maxLengthCharacters” entry in main.a627abc1.js build file and re-save it with the edit “options.maxLengthCharacters”, now it works fine.
So, I’d say there is a problem somewhere in the build step.
I will give it a go on my remote server, if I have to edit the build fine there as well, I can do that but it makes me a little nervous for future upgrades if I have to keep in mind specific edit(s) to built js files.