Long time Drafts user. In the old days I would have taken this up with the Developer. I think maybe the forum is a better way to go.
Before text expander gained a subscription option, the Drafts “refresh” option “always” worked. Nowadays this option can fail if 1) you are not signed into TE, or 2) if you thought you didn’t need your subscription, but it turns out you do. It’s possible TE could “fix” this, but I suspect it would be simpler if the TE “refresh” action could report a failure. This would be AFTER the return to Drafts, since the Refresh pauses in TE. It’s possible signing in to TE would solve the issue, but it’s rare this is required. A new IPad is one of those rare conditions.
Another problem is more of a request for an enhancement: why not permit the refresh to be requested as a standalone action? There may be a way to do this now, but I don’t know how to request a settings “Action” without opening settings.
This TE problem exposes a problem with settings in general. When Drafts was a much simpler product the occasional annoyance of having to make the keyboard “disappear” in order to get to settings was pretty reasonable. But now that Drafts can do many powerful things why not A) expose settings in the widget, or B) permit settings to be opened from an action, a la my thoughts about TE. It’s not every time you need a settings action that you know which one you need.
I see there are many other “similar” topics. Maybe somebody has already asked these before, and maybe everything I want is somehow available. Either way, I’m not criticizing the Developer, I’m really just wanting a feature and not sure it’s available. Creating a topic is simpler than “searching until exhausted” (old timey COBOL joke. 
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Some of those points do look like something only Greg could address, but certainly one of them has an option now.
There is an action for that in the directory - Refresh TextExpander Snippets | Drafts Directory.
TextExpander integration is all through an SDK provided by Smile, which is closed source - so there’s really nothing I can do to fix that process. Seems like a pretty specific case where you would not be logged into TE, however. Is that a problem you are having regularly? I think I logged into my TE app years ago and have never had to do it again.
There are some cases where refreshing snippets returns a failure to Drafts, and Drafts reports it in those cases - but if the process never returns to Drafts, we don’t really get a result or anything to report.
So I would definitely report this information to Smile.
Settings are generally not frequently changed - I assume you change your TE snippets a lot, so have a specific need here - which should be solved by having an action associated with TE refresh. I can’t think of a reason other than that to have the settings button always visible.
First, thanks for suggesting the TE refresh action. Second, thanks, Greg, for responding. Third, what makes the issue so infuriating is a weird case of NOT refreshing snippets and then discovering they are not working. I have a few very old IOS keyboard shortcuts which mask the problem. So it took me a minute …the point is that Drafts has no way to trap this error. I wasn’t sure, but I’m not surprised. I will mention this to TE, but I doubt much will come if it.
The real problem here is Apple. TE is a victim here, since it is designed to be a background process, and that’s not allowed. But if you don’t buy too many new iPads and you think all your settings transfer, you’d think something like an auto-sign on would be allowed.
Why would you want to change settings without interrupting the workflow? Answer, not so much to change as to remember what picked. I totally understand that the “settings” feature effectively must break into whatever else is going on. My real issue here is finding the icon, especially because it is “hiding” underneath the keyboard.
Thanks to both of you! I consider my questions answered and the matter closed.
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Can you not set a timeout? Not knowing iOS from a developer’s perspective I don’t know if this is possible.