There's got to be something with the scenes. I just edited my rule (mode/scene sync) to not trigger the scene per mode for evening and instead just listed all the same devices/settings as actions in this rule and everything set correctly. And all without delay, optimization, or discrete settings of course bc they don't exist in RM.
It will take a while to convert all the scenes into RM actions, but I'm going to try this over the next couple days and see how behavior is. Super curious why this might be more successful, seems the scenes are a much more delicate approach.
And one more thing to point out, is that if anything didn't set correctly, all I'd need to do is trigger this rule, which doesn't care about the state of the scene activator switch anyway.