[chef] Environment based attributes not applied on initial client run?

[< >]

I recently decided to pull a bunch of attributes out of a "base" role we had
and move them to our environment as they were getting applied everywhere.  
This
worked all fine and dandy UNTIL I tried to create a new node.

It seems that on the initial bootstrap of a node the environment based
attributes are NOT merged in.  On the subsequent chef run AFTER the initial
bootstrap everything works as expected.

I am using Chef-client 11.4.0 and hosted chef on the back end.

Has anybody else seen this behavior?  Is this expected?  I haven't had time to
dig around in the source yet.  I was hoping to save myself hours of debugging
:)

I am using the default_attributes method in my environment file and then
uploading it to the server file knife environment from file.

Any input or war stories are appreciated.

-Brian