Animation Curve View inconsistent behavior

I've been developing in Unity for some years now, but just recently started using the Animation Curve editor. It's pretty neat. However, in working with more complex sequences of animation, I've been experiencing some really frustrating behaviors that really are making me not like it so much. Many of them are glitchy, happen once, are difficult to reproduce, and difficult to concretely describe. I'll continue to characterize those for mention later. But I'll start with one that is definitely repeatable - zooming behavior.

Zooming behavior is really frustrating. First of all, the 'F' key functionality does NOT work as described in the manual, or the Unity tutorial video. Supposedly, with nothing selected in the Curve view, pressing 'F' will 'zoom-all' to the shown curves. RARELY works. Most often it zooms to the selected object in the Scene view! Or, supposedly if I box-select some keys in the Curve view, pressing 'F' should zoom to that area. That SOMETIMES works, I'd estimate about half the time. The other half, it zooms out, or does absolutely nothing. Very frustrating!

Overall, the zoom level is very inconsistent. When selecting an object in Hierarchy view and viewing the Animation curve, it seems that the zoom level is different every time. With object A selected, I zoom to one level, then select object B, then come back to object A, and the zoom level is completely different than previous. Often it is zoomed WAY in, sometimes it is zoomed out, it seems very random.

Are these behaviors expected? Surely I am not the only one experiencing this? (I don't think so, because I've seen a few other users making similar observations). Am I not understanding how to use this feature?

I would greatly appreciate any enlightenment....

(BTW, these behaviors were observed on the Mac, using latest release version 4.1.2f1. I have not tried on PC)