Home Assistant Discovery

I’m struggling with proper setup for home assistant devices. MQTT shows discovery working just fine and i see subsequent state messages in MQTT. Home Assistant detects the new devices. However, because the initial name is so cryptic i generally change the name. That part works fine too (using the home assistant form from the installation instructions). After a reboot of the zigbee2mqtt pi, the new name is in place, home assistant rediscovers it and even the sensor entities look good from a naming perspective. BUT…all of the entities are unavailable. Does anyone know why or how i can correct whatever configuration problem that exists in HA now? In MQTT, there is a topic under the zigbee2mqtt node for the device and it is regularly posting state info. I can even use node-red and direct mqtt interaction to automate around the device. Just no state in HA.I can’t find the answer in the docs, although i am still combing. Any ideas?? Thanks in advance.