Thanks Simon for the additional information - i guess that is the major problem as their is no concise reference for how JSONATA interacts within the NR environment.
So whenever i think i will tackle something with it - i do a search on the forums first to see if i can find something close and then start trying to mangle that to fit what i want. If there is nothing on the forums i then go into the Wild Wild West and start searching and that becomes even more confusing.
Then you come back and feed it into the expression validator - but it does not return anything useful as there is no current message (in the case of the Change node for instance)
What would be nice is if there was a way to tag a message in the debug window and choose to feed that through the expression analyzer
Anyway - you are right - simplified it right down as you suggested and that works just fine.
Craig