Thank you, Jory for your response! I will make the recommended adjustments. If taxonomies should not be related through custom fields, as you say, what is the intended use case of having that as an option in the first place?
* doh! I can’t spell “associate”! So embarrassed!
In this case, the demo imported reported the process was successful; I even double-checked those settings mentioned in the KB article. At this point, I’m blaming my ineptitude at server management as once I installed plesk, the demo import worked just fine.
Thanks for responding!