I tried the bass expansion swap thing and have a theory on what you saw, since it almost fooled me.
The track inspector will switch what ProChannel strip it's showing based on the track selection focus. After I rendered, the Master bus's ProChannel took the place of the audio track's ProChannel in the inspector. And like magic the Bass switch looked like it turned on, but my two strips had other differences which made me realize that the Inspector wasn't looking at my audio track anymore, but it was subtle and easy to miss. Selecting each track showed the settings hadn't changed.