A Page Associate role assignment is not for editing a page. It just makes that page available as a Page Parent selection.

If you have Page Restrictions in place, your user will need a Page Editor role assignment for desired pages.

BTW - one of the most confusing things about the plugin is knowing what 'role' has which options. It's not intuitive, nor is there a description on the wordpress backend while you're trying to figure it out. I'm sure you have a description somewhere, but including it IN the plugin would be nice. 

I understand that with all the options (this plugin enables one to change EVERYTHING), it would be hard to do this - but a brief explanation of what you meant 'page associate' to mean would have been nice. 

One other thing I did - give editors with the capacity to change things the option to change higher roles than themselves.

I think that probably changed the ability to give different roles - which was weirdly missing, even though I was logged in as admin. I think that was probably the only real bug here. The rest was just me being confused about the plugin.