Hey, I am finally back at this. I am starting to get it, thanks to the advice given here.
First surprise was that in my month-old test database, the material queue was dated 11/18/21, since the order I chose was set to ship by Nov. 18. So when I went looking for today’s Queue, nothing was there. Kind of silly to me, since even in the real DB, there are many orders with old dates. Guess that goes back to the whole discussion of adding a promise date to the sales order…
@Matt_Belshaw This is perfect. It sure is a lot of steps, though! It makes me think it could be automated, and I bet if search I will find things on here about that already. 
On the allocate by lot/bin, it didn’t work for me, so I did by part instead. And now I try again and it seems to work OK. So, what is the effect of that? Help guide just says “You can also select to allocate by lot/bin or serial number.” That explains a lot.
Edit: OK, now I see the lot/bin problem:
I see the allocation happen but no MtlQ record is created? I’ll have to toy with this some more.