Actually, there’s a pretty clear reason why this is happening (finally cracked open the source code to take a look).
By default, a view’s controller will inherit it’s parent controller through a calculated property. You can see how that works here. Observers do not trigger on calculated properties until they are accessed for the first time. So, this behavior is not a bug, it is working exactly how it’s supposed to (though in this case, it does seem unintuitive).
Components can be very powerful. I have (and others have) done some pretty sophisticated UIs leveraging components…And, perhaps, rather than thinking about your graph as a single component, you could think about it as a bunch of smaller components that can interact with one another through their parent component…(there’s good talk about doing that here).
But, we still face the problem of not being able to programmatically add or remove child components…that would be a really nice feature. 