@bravenel Well, I am running the node.js on a Mac and I setup tcpdump to watch for incoming traffic from the HE hub to trying to emulate your experiment.
When I use any of the commands I have programmed, I see traffic between the HE and my server. All seems to work well.
When I include a % as a variable indicator no traffic is seen coming into the server. The only time it does is if it's followed by a 20 (as in %20 to denote a white space).
No incoming traffic from the hub to the Mac. As soon as I remove the % in any string of an HTTP GET, there is traffic between the hub and my Mac.
When I ran the rule above, you can see in the second pic that the Room/clearqueue made it to the server. The following command with the % wrapped around the variable never left the HE.