Form formatting not saving

I'm trying to create in Acrobat DC a document (job quotation) that has some simple inbuilt formatting such as date and number ($). The formatting never sticks, open in reader (DC, older acrobat, Preview) formatting gone.

Is also stuffed when I re-open in program it was made with

Am saving it out as Reader Extended, to desktop, to Document Cloud, nothing works.

This is the exact same behaviour as my previous attempt in creating an invoice. Some stuff would work, such as custom scripts to generate number sequences, but the out-of-box stuff fails.

Is there something I'm missing? have googled the crap out of this.

It was never this difficult or flaky when I did this stuff on older versions many years past.

If there is a very specific workflow to make this happen, would someone care to share it?

And BTW, what's up with the inability to edit an extended form once it's made?

Have to save a copy and recook it just to fix a typo. Hugely inefficient.

I would roll back to an earlier Acrobat but it seems it's not covered under the CC license.

Using Acrobat DC v15.10.20060.174425, Mac OS X 10.11.3.