If anyone should ever dare to get into enabling portal creation from a module they might run into issues where certain modules don't *appear* to be being instantiated right ... here's what the answer is.  At least this is what I ran into and sorted out.

We were overly concerned with explicitly denying access to pages for certain roles and this worked against an efficient template, given that we're copying Catalook settings, etc. to the child portals and using Advanced Configuration to create the template.

1.   It appears the best approach is to not get complex with explicit denies but to rely on DNN to get it right. 
2.  If an explicit deny is required only set the one that is needed :)
3. Some catalook settings copy with "Include Content" selected and others don't.  Also, some of their modules do not police themselves, that is, for the CAT ITEMPANENF there are 339 settings created whether these are all to be used or not.  The design needs to be what it needs to be, I'm not picking on them.  The point is where you have a lot of settings already being created / configured for view, don't over do it with setting denies on View / Edit in DNN.  It turned out best to let Catalook have "a free hand here" -- that is leverage what it has.
   
   Also, there is a CAT_Resources table that caches some settings and occasionally this works against the developer.  It took many hours and another developer familiar with Catalook (and using Fiddler) to figure out there was a non-existent tab persisted in the Resources table.  This needed to be removed.

Long story short ... when these factors were all tuned, the reports modules "started working" :) .  Apparently having a template far too busy with setting permissions on top of all else it as doing was getting in the way.  This wasn't figured out until a reports module was copied to the home page of a portal and darn if it didn't perform as expected.

So, there is no mysterious issue where just because the reports modules do install from the Host menu / Log in that somehow elevated permissions had to be entered into what I was creating.  Nah ... careful attention to detail must be leveraged to get the process to work.  And it will if this is the guiding principle while creating such an approach.

Sebastian,

Working our own day jobs and making this fund raising idea work is coming to a close.  We'll be going live on 1 Sept 2015.

What is the venue to post solutions I've found along the way?  I've got quite a bit of stuff that's of use to other developers.

Thanks,

Mike