Hey
Thanks for the reply. 4 months or not, I’m still only on the cusp of grasping it!
I think the important thing I didn’t recognise is that Cycles is a *backwards* path tracer. This Stack Exchange question is really helpful in understanding how Cycles works: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/5820/how-is-cycles-different-from-blender-internal
Once you appreciate that, it’s a little easier to visualise why this happens… though I am still getting it straight in my head.
