Well. I tried the jwtauthdemo and it worked as expected.
I created a new project using the XData template and it worked as expected.
Which is odd, as the project I'm working on is exactly that. So I'll have to just recreate it step-by-step and see where it went sideways. I wasn't very far into it (demo project for the blog) so that's why I was thinking there was something amiss. The good news is that this means that I should be able to figure out what it was at some point today 