Why doesn't the Chatter Feed refresh when the model reloads?

Yep, this is exactly right, Barry. To explain why that’s the case, I’ll borrow from Zach on this post: “Skuid basically uses the Salesforce chatter:feedWithFollowers component, internally, and this component, as we have verified through communications directly with Salesforce engineers, was ‘not built to be used more than once on a single page’”.