Getting a response with guidance, questions about your setup and the general hope that your system gets up and running so you can enjoy the amazing power that app_rpt and ASL are offering to simple radios, is the beauty of this community. It welcomes all and provides help where possible, and it all gets documented on the forum so that others can learn from our experiences (and frustrations).
Some of the things you are asking about might have been tried before as well but maybe with different radios or hardware etc. for example How to setup local (private) node and server - #13 by kb5won might give you some guidance as to what might be missing.
Since you mentioned you are able to communicate via zoiper etc. then it could be HT and fob connections.
Have you checked the simple tune menu? Check out option “V” to see how your node radio is responding when it receives signal. Also see if your CTCSS and Carrier options are correct. Some basic troubleshooting like that might pinpoint what exactly could be wrong.