I've not seen this before! Any ideas?

Okay,

That did not help.

However, taking the board and programmer definitions out of the Sketchbook 'hardware' directory and editing them directly into the main boards.txt and programmers.txt worked. Seems the Arduino IDE has some trouble in properly determining locations of files and directories. It would indicate that the Sketchbook 'hardware' directory concept is not properly supported, or at the very least, not properly documented.