Darg-and-drop only creates pattern swatches

Hello all,

This is probably a super obvious answer, since I'm basically trial-and-error trained, but I learned through various tutorials that an easy way to create a color swatch was to drag an object of the desired color into the swatches panel and drop it there to create a swatch. 

Fast forward to (how did it go that long without my noticing?!) weeks later and I realize that all the swatches I have for a project are pattern swatches, therefore, difficult and inefficient to edit or tweak the actual hue/saturation/etc, and just generally wrong, which annoys me. When I realized this, I also realized that every time I tried to create a new swatch through the panel, it would come up as "new pattern swatch."

I started to go through the eyedropper tool and the swatch panel made normal color swatches, so the issue is no longer urgent, but I would like to know for future reference - does drag and drop only create pattern swatches, is there something wrong with my document settings or some other issue?