Hi Doug,
If you look at vanilla osTicket 1.14‘s Advanced Search > Columns you’ll see that you can add Columns.
But starting in osTicket 1.15 they revamped the way Advanced Search works, and there is no longer an option to add columns. I’m not sure what the purpose of the “use standard columns” checkbox is because, yes, in my experience it is always greyed out.
In short, this is not an osTicket Awesome issue, but rather an upstream change that the osTicket devs have made.
If you wished to pursue it I would suggest opening an Issue on GitHub.