To ease your mind, it is both confusing and otherwise.
I have noticed that rather weird behavior, namely of opening a folder and having it display in a manner not of my choosing, over and over again. I set it in icon view, mutz around with other files, sometimes in list, sometimes in column view, and go back to the first folder to find it in some other view.
Very annoying, to say the least.
Apple should have built a simple solution into OS X to deal with this issue (rather than requiring users to seek out third-party applications to do the job — which job shouldn't have to be done in the first place).
Short of futzing about with deleting .DS_Store files (with all the attendant mystery [to my mind]), I guess the best way to deal with the issue is to grin and bear it — although what I'd like to bare to Apple is something entirely different.
Again, it's passing curious that Apple advisors, both frontline and senior, seem to be totally unaware of the issue in light of your elegant description of same.
