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Revenue was collected at Charleston, not at Sumter.

You are missing the point. Charleston was not collecting revenues for Lincoln because Charleston sat in South Carolina, which had seceded from Lincoln's government. Fort Sumter was previously a mothballed defensive location built on an artificial island in the middle of the harbor entrance to Charleston. When Anderson occupied it he literally assumed a position that allowed him to be the gatekeeper to the city. From Sumter Lincoln could stop any ship he wanted from entering until it paid its tariff, regardless of who controlled the customs house in town.

It's hard to see how holding onto the fort would bring any more money into the federal coffers.

Perhaps, though it is not hard at all to see why allowing the confederacy to go on its own way threatened to completely undermine the north's protectionist trade scheme. In fact most northern newspapers openly admitted that to be the case while calling for war.

You find quotes that Lincoln cared about revenue and tariffs. That's only natural. Administrators spend a lot of time with budgets and revenues are important to any enterprise.

You are obfuscating around the issue. Lincoln did not simply care about tariffs in general. He cared about a specific type of tariff - high protectionist ones. He cared about them because he took office at the exact point of a major and drastic change in U.S. tariff policy from one of free trade to one of heavy protection, the latter being a position with which he closely aligned and on which he had campaigned heavily to win the presidency.

The obsession, if obsession is what were talking about, is more DiLorenzo's and the neo-confederates' than Lincoln's. It involves digging up every reference to tariffs and ignoring the rest of the record to create a mistaken impression.

The only mistaken impression is that which neglects Lincoln's thoroughly documented espousal of protectionism. There was a widely distributed Republican Party campaign poster in the 1860 election. It featured dual engravings of Lincoln and Hamlin with a slogan and two decorative engravings in between. One engraving was of two factory workers holding steelmaking tools. The other engraving was of a factory smokestack and a ship being loaded with manufactured goods. Emblazoned across them were two slogans - one pertaining to the GOP backed and Democrat opposed Homestead Act instructing citizens to vote for "free speech, free homes, and free territory." Below it and in between the two factory workers was a large federal-style shield with bolded lettering reading "Protectionism to American Industry" in reference to the GOP backed and Democrat opposed Morrill Tariff Act. The campaign poster contained not so much as a single word about the plight of the slaves.

But it also looks to me mistaken to argue that he had some secret agenda throughout the crisis.

One need not accuse him of a nefariously connotated mass conspiracy, though it is perfectly truthful to note that Lincoln was an extremely secretive man who carried out many policies in private that he was neither open about nor an advocate of in his public appearances.