Am I understanding correctly- you can have a value list which tunnels though relationships, but portals are less agreeable?

I didn't have the match fields set properly, obviously, so the relationship wasn't good all the way through.

My portal looked good in table1 to table3. From table2, I was using a match field from table1 to establish the same portal to table3.

The relationship between table1 and table2 was rotty, so values from table3 weren't showing up.

Apologies.