Found why....

By checking more how index are created by my developers, if found that one method for index creation is setting page level locking to on by default and the other is setting it to off.

If you set right click on index folder under a specific table, and you select new index, the option is set to off by default in index creation dialog.  You have to go to the options page to turn it on.

If you go through the table context menu and select modify, to add an index, then the option is ON by default for the new index created.

I suspect that a lot of people are going to wonder why reorganize fail spuriously on some index on development boxes.  Here you have an hint.