At this point I patched my whole environment so that I'm running the version from svn that works for me, it's going to take a bit of unwind to get back to the system version to figure out what's getting picked up there.
GNU Emacs 24.5.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.22.7) of 2017-02-10 on lcy01-09, modified by Debian [2 times]
emacs auto header won't cycle to current header level