ok - I give up.
I was hoping that I could find a working version of User Manager, but every version is riddled with bugs.
UM is simply not ready, and based on Mikrotik's dev track record, I have no realistic expectation that is will ever become anything other than a poorly documented and unreliable time and money waster.
It was nice to get bgp for a low buy in, but for the man hours wasted on trying to get it to work, I could have bought Cisco.