LaTeX.org

Good points.

Now back to the original question: What am I doing wrong that I can't paste chunks of equations?

Scott:

Wasn't aware that there were enough common readers of this group and the SE tex group for it to be significant. I will mention that in future.

Interesting. Multiple help files. Didn't look for that. Should have. My bad.

Can't say as it helped a whole lot, and it doesn't help at all with ...

Groveling elsewhere I found a post suggesting that changing the binding for ^Command V from primary selection paste to selection paste may make pasting work better.

So hie off to the preferences -> editing -> shortcuts.

And there is:
clipboard-paste
clipboard-paste-simple
paste
primary-seletion ...

Entering math is slick, and within a half an hour I could work as fast as I used to in Frame Maker, much faster than I can using asciimath (with the ton of extra ()'s)

I'm cursed with awful handwriting. I'm trying to find an evironment that does for math what word processing does for writing ...