I confess I don’t know anything about using rails, but I was able to confirm the original topics were really gone using data-explorer queries (per another user’s suggustion, that I can’t seem to track down right now).
As far as I can tell, my setup now does seem to ‘know’ which staff topics are the ones to use, even if the methodology I followed to make that happen (which I also can’t seem to track down right now!) was a bit less hardcore than the rails edit route.