Hopefully I'm not leading this discussion off the rails by bringing up velocity. But I was using a preset on the weekend that was programmed this way. I can't remember the name of it, but it had "(vel)" at the end of the name to indicate it was doing something special with velocity. I don't know how many presets are like this, but I doubt it's anywhere near 40% of them ... so it makes me wonder if you're running into something else.
Regarding your last question ... I'm assuming when you say "placing" a note, you're talking about drawing it in the PRV. If that's the case, when you draw a note, it will have the default velocity (which you can change). When you play the note, the velocity will depend on how hard you press the key.
Or, do you find that when you record a note and then play it back, it sounds different?