Ooh, nice. I shall do that, then; thanks.
(I'd discovered the "solution" by just not being sure if I was supposed to put the example1 folder in mods, or the contents of example1 in mods - I've had issues with other things that said "put contents of zip file in XYZ", but came out of being zipped with an extra layer of folder that wasn't supposed to be there. So that was mostly just dumb luck. The second, though, was persistence: I had a working mission, and a non-working mission, and just started cutting out differences until I found where the problem was.)
And now, on to trying my hand at making a ship! Whee! Well... "ship". With quotes. Because obviously the game needs space dragons. ;-)