Gretchen,
I am glad you are also advocating a similar experience as I have been through. This may sound bizarre, but to add more spanners to the works, it seems that different results are achieved with the Support Packs depending on what version of Netweaver you are using GRC. I know there are more problems on NW 7.31, therefore I wonder if there is some issues with the underlying code of the GRC tool itself.
Anyways, probably should start another discussion for this, but back ot the original point, best way forward is transports and ensuring all the SP's are on same level universally.