That's what I thought too, and it looked like it was going to work, but there was some problem with the Postgres drvier and that's where I went off the rails. After rebuilding the PG driver it was incompatible with the non-rebuilt nsd binary.
However, it looks like I got things working. The templating system files in the Tcl library are in an ats subdirectory, and they weren't being loaded. My guess is that the old version descended into subdirs and the slightly-less-old version does not; I can't recall ever seeing any discussion of this before, but I can't see any other reason why they would not be loaded. I copied the ats tcl files into the main tcl directory and it seems to be working now. *knock wood* :)