Your text is very hard to read with “…” scattered throughout it. I think what you’re running into is the fact that case does not resolve symbols used in the match on the left hand side. So:
(def FOO "bar")
(case FOO
FOO "baz"
"default")
;; => default
Like you said, since it will try and match the value “baz” to the symbol FOO.
(def XYZ 'FOO)
(case XYZ
FOO "baz"
"default")
;; => "baz"
So for your case, you should continue to use condp = if you want to store the value you want to match against inside of a var.