It should be achievable with Tissue add-on.

Make sure the normal's of your objects are correctly ponting outward. In your image they are not in the component object (you can see it from the dark blue tint of the faces). I'll suggest to check the orientation by enabling the Normals checkbox in the Mesh Display Panel. But that's not what prevents you from obtaining a good result.
From your images it seems that the adaptative geometry is collapsed on the Z-axis. Try to keep the value away from the 0, and also check the rotation of the component: the add-on is expecting a shape developing on the Global Z axis.
Dont' forget to pick the objects in the correct order and leave Quad mode in the settings.

Note that as tris based adaptation is currently not supported, you'll encounter some deformation on the cylinder. A possible alternative that would not led you to a component distortion could be Duplifaces:

You should perform a "smart" remove doubles in order to get rid of the spaces between the duplicated component (Dupliface it's not adaptative as Tessellate is).

About your last pick, I may guess your component has some loose geomerty that is altering the overall boundary. As all the geometry is taken into account, the space beteween the componeent and the vertex, will be reproduced too.
