There been no changes whatsoever to the channel's flags, regardless of you suspectng them to be incorrect and later on you obviously found out that they work nonetheless for you. And "policy" is meant to refer to something completely different than channel flags, it's the "nettiquette" which I told you like every other member of techstaff about, which is about "24/7 logged in to admin channel". I am not calling you names.
admin channel access is controlled via invite-exempt list (/mode -I), in the very beginning it been based on access-list (/msg chanserv help access). You been on both lists from the time you first got invited into admin channel and showed up there. When you don't authenticate to nickserv, you can't get identified by neither of both lists and access cannot get granted. When your client tries to autojoin protected channels on client startup, before you authenrticated, then you'll run into trouble. Nothing a chanop could do about that, call that "refuse to fix" if you want.