Sooooo... it turns out after months of fighting with this issue...both not being able to change offset, as well as not being able to create new page setups, digging through 27 custom lisp files with dozens of routines in them, several vs solutions and not finding anything....what the original cad manager did was edit the default MNL file to delete changes to any page setups, and load one's from a file deep within the network bahaha...
Perhaps his final practical joke. Was a dooozzyyyy