Are your suggestions workarounds or is this the way pp is supposed to work?

Ideally, pp would pack all of the needed dlls except, I guess, for the Windows system dlls.
Unfortunately, it can sometimes miss one or more dlls that need to be packed in.

When that happens you need to firstly identify, and then explicitly include, those dlls.
I think it's safe to leave out missing Windows system dlls, as the ones on the destination machine should load ok.

If the "destination" machine is the machine that built the executable, then the executable should run ok (without any need to pack in the missing dlls) if the path includes the location of those "missing" dlls.

Cheers,
Rob