It causes nothing but trouble when a non savvy person buys MT wifi and dives right in..........
That's the main reason why RouterOS and Mikrotik isn't more popular than it is. It's not plug and play. As a sometime software developer, I love the complexity but there is a massive learning curve compared to other devices, inc. Cisco. It's power is both it's strength and weakness at the same time.
When I started using Mikrotik kit, I asked whether there was a reference book I could buy. There isn't. Thank goodness for YouTube videos but even then you come across conflicting advice and configurations.
What happened here is perfectly understandable - I
had configured the access point manually first and not cleared the configuration, therefore it didn't work. I can see the reason CAPsMAN exists - in a large installation it really helps save time. I installed the system this evening - went well. The ability to change the 2G channel width from 40MHz to 20MHz in one step was great.
Once you've climbed that not inconsiderable learning curve, RouterOS is wonderful but hindsight is a wonderful thing. The manual is a reference and not that easy to navigate. I recently had reason to implement NGINX which for somebody not that familiar with Linux is a daunting task. I came across "The Complete NGINX Cookbook" - a stunningly good free manual. RouterOS needs something like that.