UPDATE:
I will spare all of you the gory details, but I have a request in with the developer on why we are experiencing this. There is a setting that appears to be inconsistently set (or perhaps I just don't understand why it is set that way) and I have asked some questions with the developers and other forum admins in the Xenforo support forums to help me understand what I'm looking at.
Suffice to say that right now, it looks like donating members can upload to
sub-categories in the downloads section, but not at the parent level. This is by design so as to make sure downloads are organized by category and not cluttering up the download manager with no organization.
This presents two problems: 1)how does one know this without prior knowledge and 2) if we want members to upload otherwise generally
uncategorized files, then there should be a category for this. I would put the problem encountered in this support ticket into this category. Most files have been uploaded to the downloads manager by a handful of members over the years - into preset categories of their specific interest.
@wa5cab and his plethora of Atlas/Craftsman files are the best example of this. Most members just don't share files to the downloads section.
In trying to determine how to organize the downloads section so that categories can be utilized by more members, as all of you have signaled in this support ticket, I ran into this setting problem. Please sit tight, more to come.