So - That kind of brings us full circle. Thank you (honestly) for the response.
I should have just posted what i found and left my frustration out of it.
FWIW - It is not lack of faith/trust in THIS project or its team - it is the frustration of attempting to consume/use the majority of projects like this. I think often the devs and regular contributors often lose sight of the fact that most of us are not devs too!
The open source community is pretty much divided into the gurus and the code consumers. Most code consumers do not know how to make a pull request - even if they did stumble upon the correct answer somewhere. Searching for answers often results in more frustration when numerous similar issues are also unanswered.
regarding conf.d
I am not sure that I understand. Unless I am missing something, Will the result will not always be the nginx default server and not zammad, regardless of what is put in the zammad.conf - as it is negated by the root directive that comes AFTER the include. I know very little about nginx - just what I have read while researching my issue.
Regarding ElasticSearch
I have tried on 2 fresh installs of CentOS 7 - following the zammd docs 100%
Elastic Generates a plugin error
Typing “y” at the permissions prompt is ignored and the install is rolled back
per the link above using --batch fixed the issue and allowed the install to work