First let me start off by saying that an answer to this question will change very little in reality for anybody; but having a general sense of what I'm asking could at least give me some peace of mind that I understand generally what is happening in some odd cases.

We've got 2 defects open that are ostensibly unrelated.  In one instance saved search sublist filter fields sometimes appear when they should and sometimes don't... for instance 50% of the time I see them, 50% I don't.  The other defect is related to saved searches for Projects with joined Project Task record fields.  Some percentage of the time the {projecttask.title} field returns the title including those of task's parent tasks (i.e. 'Parent 1 : Sub-Parent 1 : Task') and some percentage of the time not (i.e. just 'Task'). And it's not in different contexts, it's in the exact same saved