martin rudalics writes:

> Your explanation is correct.  The behavior is intended as a feature but
> inherently breaks the behavior of `pop-to-buffer', especially when used
> interactively.  I intend to fix this soonish for Emacs 25 and also post
> a simple workaround you can use for Emacs 24.4.
>
> Kindly add your observations to this thread
>
> http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=20206
>
> so we can discuss the solution there.

I couldn't find an obvious way to contribute to the thread.

Anyway, I tried adding Eli's suggestions to ~/.emacs; this didn't seem to  
make any difference, even if I temporarily remove everything else from there.