Honestly not sure on any of that.
You should have been able to just center the pivot to put the scale/rotation pivots back at the same point.
Without looking at your wire file it’s hard to debug why something is behaving a certain way. Also keep in mind groupings or construction history can cause things to freak out. Try deleting your construction history and making sure your node is completely ungrouped and then see if you still get strange results when duplicating. You may have an operation (projection, trim, etc) that’s causing your issues because it’s doing something weird in the background that you’ve forgotten about.