I'm finding some stranger things (eek!) with piston block facing when placing it on another block.

I'm trying to get a piston to face downwards by looking upwards and clicking on the left side of a block to the right. Instead of facing downwards, the piston will always face outwards. But, it only happens in this spot when I am facing north. If I move to the west and face east, it will place downwards, even though the angle of my click is now even less.

As a test, I also ran three blocks straight up and tried to place while facing north, and it faces downwards just fine.....

In the screenshots below, Red 1 shows the redstone I'm working with. I'm trying to get a piston (this happens with both stick and regular) to face downwards into the redstone block.

Red 2 shows what happens when I place the piston. The piston goes sideways and is extended from the redstone block. The cursor is the exact spot I clicked. I am facing north here.

If I move around to Red 3 and face east, clicking the same area of the green block, the piston will face downwards as I expect.

Red 4 is my test stack a few blocks away from my redstone work. I click in the exact same spot as I do around the redstone block and it faces downwards... And, I'm facing north...

As another test I ran the green concrete on the right of the redstone up one more block then over one block above the redstone block so I could face almost straight up into something. The piston still faced outwards when placing facing north, and faced downards when placed facing east.

My coordinates at the "I can't make this face downwards" location (Red 2 screenshot) are -32, 50, -6.

One caveat should it matter, this is a superflat world with 50x layers of sand and 1x bedrock. I just created it on the old xbox MC version and imported it here so I could easily work on my redstone.