I am not sure what your point is, but anyway... I guess, the SL (I have experimented with it a little bit) has a better "stickiness" of the view options in folder view. However, Leopard is not like that.
What I described is the way OS X has always behaved, with the only change from one version to another being the list of available views. The "stickiness" (or lack thereof) has always been as I described (and has always been highly non-intuitive).
