Who would would possibly know why they did it this way? What's the point of
wasting time speculating about WHY?

When confronted with something that is so incredibly against convention (and
that I have somehow not noticed for the last 10 or so years), it pulls
terribly at my curiosity.

Also, to increase my understanding of computers and calculating program.

You have a problem to solve. I would think your time would be better spent
on that aspect. Fundamentally, you need to add parentheses to an expression
like -X^2 so it becomes -(X^2).

Yes, this is the obvious fix. However, I have been (and will continue to)
copy formulas from Mathematica (in Input Form, which is almost identical to
Excel format, except for issues like this). If I could avoid all past and
future manual changes to be spreadsheets, this would be incredibly valuable.

But alas.

Here's to checking assumptions...

Cheers,
Peter