Every now and then for a long while we heard from our citizen developers that apps didn't behave as developed in target instances after being published or deployed from the dev instance, this because they were missing choice or fulfillment configuration entries. I also noticed an old post from @Community Alums (https://www.servicenow.com/community/developer-forum/list-choices-are-gone-after-deploying-application-from-studio/m-p/2879885) on the similar topic, did you ever conclude that one properly Stephen?
What we have confirmed recently is that there seems to be a bug in Catalog Builder, when you develop scoped apps in Dev (which we all should), some type of records are not recorded properly into the app even though all looks good. We are heavy users of Step Based Fulfillment and Citizen development first noticed records of the following type will get missed in deployment in our environment when developed using Catalog Builder. A visible symptom is also that these have the sys_update_name and display_name field blank in the Application Fiels (sys_metadata) table when authored this way, if instead using the App Engine Catalog Editor, the records get these fields set and sent properly.
sys_choice
sc_service_fulfillment_task_step
sc_service_fulfillment_approval_step
If you do deploy Catalog Builder apps from dev to other instances using the repository or pipeline, compare your dev instance with next instance for records created and hopefully deployed since the last clone-down.
