User blog feed not always shown as "registered" in user's profile when selected by Blog Feed Finder

To recreate:

new user - create an account in the context of a course...
check the user is enrolled
blog feed finder - register a blog feed url for the course + user
it shows as a feed in the user's profile (feed is associated with the user and course in WP), but shows that the feed is not registered (there's no CouchDB record) and as a result blog harvesting doesn't work.
on site's WEnotes tab, it shows that the feed is registered
after clicking "update" for that user + blog, the feed is registered (i.e. it shows as registered on the user's profile)