Cash or Charge?

I used to think I knew Europe pretty well with regard to expected financial transactions, but not any more.  All of my normal expectations have been turned on their head with no perceivable pattern or trend.  

David and I purposely brought both our 'swipe' debit card and our 'chip' credit card to make sure we would have access to our personal funds, but the group travel card only comes as a 'swipe' card (without a chip), which I expected might be a problem.  It was.  None of the automatic ticket machines would take a swipe card, although most of the stores could do both kinds of transactions.  It was never predictable which card would work for any particular transaction.

My previous experience is that European vendors prefer cash to cards, but apparently not in some venues.  The church we toured in Amsterdam had a large sign on the door "cards only, no cash"  ( I had just withdrawn a lot of cash from the group account to pay for the church entry, so this was annoying).  It happened at one other venue we visited as well.  I speculated that perhaps it was linked to problems with counterfitting, but a cashier seemed puzzled when I asked about this, so maybe not.  When I went to the grocery store to get food for our next day on the train, it was cash only (no cards!).  This was also annoying because I had just spent my last euros planning to move on to the Danish currency and not wanting any left over.  So I went to the ATM and got more cash, and ended up having some left over.