I haven’t studied your question or thought too hard on this answer, so forgive me if I’m way off, but sometimes you need to make sure your relation is a single (not multiple) relation. That will return a single lookup result which will help it show up in the list of available columns. Otherwise it’s treated as an array value and can’t be used in areas of the builder that require a single value.
aah! I didn’t know that - that was exactly the issue, I changed the relation to ‘not-mulitiple’ and I was able to see the single value lookup columns - thanks Jeff