@BryanB the best (and most up to date) examples in the repo are the email app and webhosting. The other examples haven’t been ported to the updated APIs from alpha 2 (insofar as I’m aware).
The confusion over the inspector has been noted, and we’ll be straightening that out ([MAID-2382] - JIRA for reference).
Here you need to be sure to be committing the changes to the network. Inserting / editing mutable data changes are not propagated to the network automatically (which is probably not clear enough in the docs). You must call applyEntriesMutation once you’re done updating your MD objects.
If you take a look at the email example for (safe comms)[https://github.com/maidsafe/safe_examples/blob/master/email_app/app/safenet_comm.js], or webhosting hopefully that’ll clarify some of the mutable data workflow.
Hope that helps a bit. Any more Qs of if I missed something let me know, @BryanB!