I’ve gone through help, the FAQs, the wiki, searched the forums, searched w/ Google -
how do I reset the Inspector view? Suddenly all it shows is the Project Notes - nothing else. No document notes, no index card, no status or label dialog. It just disappeared.
I’ve gone through all the UI looking for it. 
Oh, duh.
The information in the FAQ is exactly backwards (or I read it exactly backwards).
Somehow I clicked the background of the corkboard which set it to show naught but the project notes.
clicking an index card fixed it.
I’d cut & paste the FAQ section that’s confusion, but the PDF won’t let me copy.
So, I think I’ve fixed it.
Glad you’ve got it sorted out! The inspector shows information specific to a single document, so if you have no selection or are have one of the “special” folders–Draft, Research, or Trash–selected, it will only display project notes and project references. In any other case it should show the information for the selected item. In the case of clicking on the corkboard background, if the corkboard is displaying a multiple selection (it will say this in the editor header) then the inspector will display project notes/references; if the corkboard is displaying the subdocuments of a single container, then the inspector will show the meta-data for that container. So for instance if you have Folder A in the binder which contains documents 1 and 2, if you select Folder A and view its contents on the corkboard, you can click on either card 1 or 2 to see that document’s meta-data in the inspector or you can click on the corkboard background to see Folder A’s information.
If you know the section name for where you were reading in the manual, I can double-check that it’s written there correctly.