Thanks for the reply, Telot!
In looking further at the files I saved and parsed from that day, I saw, from one of my pineapple sessions, 12 unique MACs that were listed in mgmt::auth lines in the karma.log file, but I had only 5 clients listed in my dhcp.leases file. In contrast, in parsing out MACs for probe requests in the karma.log file, I came up with 44 unique MACs.
Airodump-ng had well over a hundred client MACs listed in some of the recorded scans, though I think I saw some data there that didn't look quite so reliable. Obvious MACs that wouldn't count would include 00:00:00:00:00:00, and it looked like some were very similar in their info. Counting the airodump log I saved that had the nearest time stamp to the dhcp.leases and karma.log files, I counted 85 total clients, and 38 clients who looked like they were probing for open networks. Of course, the larger portion of those were looking for the local wifi essid. Fortunately, that was an open network.
I used an app on my tablet called Fing, and did periodic ping sweeps of the subnet we were on via the local wifi. By the end of the day, I had collected 123 unique IP/MACs, though some could have been in completely different sections of the site than my pineapple could see.
As to the phone, that does help explain some of what I was seeing, because when I watched my phone try and re-associate, it seemed to insist on the same BSSID it had previously associated with. On the other hand, my tablet is an HP Touchpad running CyanogenMod 9 Alpha (ICS), and I have a pretty good track record of getting it pineappled with a little coaxing from airdrop-ng.
I wish I was better at reading the 'story' from karma.log. For instance, is it saying something bad about what happened in a probe request when it says KARMA ssid malloc'd so free it? I'd like to figure out better what is happening when I see things like a bunch of probe requests before I ever see an auth and association.
Also, I'd appreciate knowing better what's happening that makes the pineapple only work with clients trying to associate with open networks. I've read this other places in the forums, and was a bit confused. I thought Jasager would say yes to most any probe request and invite them in. Is it that the client sees the connection going open when it expected some encryption or security, and decides not to trust it?
By the way, in case you're interested, the name basically is "1 bit off" spelled as the last part of a MAC address, so you can call me 1 bit, or whatever. Mr. MAC works, too!
Thanks again for the response and additional information.