Broke my sbopkg... partially

Using slackware 15 and latest version of sbopkg. Until this point, sbopkg has been working perfectly. Plenty of disk space available, working internet connection, blah blah.

There was something I wanted to install that wasn't present in sbopkg, so I created a package via this tutorial
https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:sl..._have_time_way
namely with these commands:

1. make install DESTDIR=$(pwd)/PACKAGE
2. cd PACKAGE
3. makepkg -l y -c n ../app-version-arch-tag.txz
4. installpkg ../app-version-arch-tag.txz

and installed it. I didn't write a slack-desc.

Then I tried using sbopkg and was unable to Browse or Search for packages, or load queues, though I could see my list of queues still. This concerned me and I assumed it must have been linked to my new lazily-made package, so I removed it via built-in pkgtool. Sbopkg is still broken. I removed Sbopkg via pkgtool and re-installed Sbopkg latest via installpkg. Still broken.

I'm still able to use sqg and I can still build and install packages/queues via Sbopkg if I issue the commands sbopkg -i <pkg> or similar. But attempting to use the TUI, various functions silently fail.

Anyone have any ideas on what may have caused this bug or how to fix it?