That’s strange and I can’t reproduce that. It’s probably silently throwing an error. You could try debug on error. Or edebug orb-edit-note, orb--new-note and/or orb--pre-expand-template in this order to get the clue.
Do you use the date (biblatex) or year (plain BibTeX) field in your BibTeX file? Whatever you use, you should put all the keywords you want to expand in orb-preformat-keywords, and of course put the template placeholders where you want them.
That isn’t currently possible, unfortunately, out of the box - it’s either all authors or none. But you can use a custom function in your templates %(my-split-authors ...), which you will need to define yourself. Maybe this thread can be of some help: How to use extracted %^{keywords} from pdf as seperate filetags in note. It’s about splitting the value of the keywords field into separate keywords. You’d want to split the authors field into separate authors…