InnoDB is default, but can't install
As it turns out,  this appeared to be a file ownership problem (at least for me) and after changing the ownership to the appropriate account, I was able to continue.  I'm not sure why the error message was like that ... everything else was set correctly ... and I wish the error message was more clear.  But if anyone else is searching on this topic, it's worth a shot to make sure that every file in the civicrm directory has the same user.  If not, chown with recursion.

I had some files with the account username and some with root.  My bad.

Thanks to the commenter above for your willingness to help!