For what it's worth, I built a very simple application, with one dropdown and one chart. Two data sources; one for the list of values in the dropdown; one for the data for the chart. The chart data source has one two prompts, for which I'm passing in the same value. The code in the dropdown On Select event is:
var metric = DROPDOWN_METRIC_PRIMARY.getSelectedValue();
DS_CHART_DATA.loadDataSource();
DS_CHART_DATA.setVariableValueExt("psCompare Metric 1", metric);
DS_CHART_DATA.setVariableValueExt("psCompare Metric 2", metric);
This fails just as the more complex application. I must be missing something.