I'm not sure where you are going wrong here Liz. If I set up competencies, link them to courses, link the competencies to an organisation, set the plan template to automatically include by org and include linked courses.

Then create a dynamic audience based on organisation, save the rules, check the audience member list then go to the Learning Plan tab of the Audience and click Create Plans, then the learning plans are generated for all the members of the audience, with the appropriate competencies and courses already included.

The error message you are getting is also very very strange - prioritymode has been a field in the mdl_dp_course_settings table since the very first release of Totara 1.0 back in 2010. Could you tell me what fields exist in that table, and what records are in it?