Thanks again for the pointers. Found the issue. The “not applicable” issue appears to have been a issue in early builds of 8 with the benchmark supplied with Rocky. In the associated discussion ( OpenSCAP results notapplicable - Rocky Linux General - Rocky Linux Forum ), a user had been able to get it to work by deleting a line which ran a platform idref check. This is one of the lines we had always changed in the past, and had on the failing benchmark. What appears to have changed, at least in 9, is that RHEL also includes not only the major version number, as does Rocky, but also the minor version number. Rocky appears only to return the major. Making this additional modification allowed tests to continue.
I am assuming that this may be the case for benchmarks for other distros, but that is beyond my scope. If others find that to be the case, please add to this thread.