It's never going to ask for Twitter permissions, as I don't use Twitter for login. I only use it for the social feed. So my guess is it doesn't have permissions but I have no way of granting them.
Enabling debug mode does nothing - still just a blank social stream. But I think the fact that I don't use Twitter for login is the issue, as it will never ask for permissions. That said, what permissions does it need to PULL the feed? I'm not trying to post, just display. That should be a fully-unauthenticated API call, no?
And... the answer is yes.
I enabled Twitter login just long enough to use it once, it asked for the permissions and now the feed is showing. So the end result is that you cannot set up a Twitter social stream without also setting up Twitter login and using it at least once for each account you wish to stream. This wasn't clear in the setup instructions