Of course! It's kind of a dumb answer and maybe a unique situation that never helps anyone, but you never know. (And really I am so new to some of this, I hope I don't mess up the terminology, but here goes):
Short answer: We were fiddling with the wrong land group.
Long answer: The land is set to group-owned. As he was building the sim, the owner set it to be group owned, but owned by the group of his previous sim. I guess it was going to be easier for him that way; keep the same admins, same rights for tags, etc. He just wanted to build a new place. Eventually he made a group named after the new sim, but since that is not the controlling group, except for maybe the message board rights and/or some things I probably don't understand, the options affiliated with the various tags in that group have little or no effect.
All this was done maybe two years ago and it temporarily slipped the owners mind that he had to give me rights in the old group.
So ya, pretty much human error. Thanks again for the time ^^