Views node count overridden, why?

I'm curious as to why the views node count is being overriden. I do agree that it makes for a cleaner (i.e. easier to understand) interface if you put the node count on the acidfree settings page (admin/settings/acidfree) but if you are overriding a view it is confusing when you change the node count on the view over to see it not work.

In our case we wanted to have a different node count for the grid/list views so the view count was the best way to do this (the acidfree interface overrides both views).

Its an easy patch to roll and I'm willing to roll it I'm curious as to why this is the case, maybe I missed something? Is this a more difficult problem to solve than I think it is?