Hmm, the fact this doesn’t seem to be true (anymore? I’m running 1.6.0-beta.5) is why I went searching and came across this thread. I have a resource route that can have its model set through a sidebar nav menu. By default, you land on the index route when you select a menu item, because the link-to in the nav just links to the top resource route. From there, certain buttons will take you to other nested routes. On the resource route, I use setupController to initialize some values to false that should always be false when starting off, but turn true when you visit another nested route besides index. If I visit one of those routes, and then select a different item from the menu, everything works fine; setupController fires and resets my values. But if I select the same item that I’m already on (to essentially take me back to the index route), setupController is not fired.
What your saying is probably still true but with an addendum: “matter how you transitioned to the route, unless your already there.” This should solve the problem, however.