Long story short, it was a bug where when you tried to add an unapproved item to a new character sheet as starting item or sheet item it would barf.

Turns out the call I had for pulling item data on a click could only pull approved items, so the only thing I needed to do was send along a true/false boolean on the call based on the state of the toggle that controls if the items listed on screen are approved or unapproved, then route the call properly based on that.