Does iTunes want us to delete podcasts from the list?

So after the Podcasts.app for iPhone got another update today, I once again got stuck with trying to manage my Podcasts, and once again it drives me crazy.

Currently I am wondering this: In iTunes 11 there is an "Unplayed" and an "All Episodes" tab for each podcast. This would suggest that "All episodes" lists, well, all episodes, nut that actually is not the case. If you delete an episode (right click -> delete) or you have auto-delete activated for a podcasts (for example "keep only unplayed episodes"), iTunes actually deletes those episodes from the "all episodes" lists. wait... what? Yep. So "all episodes" does in fact NOT necessarily display all episodes. If you ACTUALLY want to see all episodes, you have to go to the itunes store.

The reason I am wondering about this is because I have limited hard drive space, and I wanted to activate auto-delete of podcasts and tell itunes to only keep unplayed episodes. The problem is that all played episodes disappear from my "all episodes" tab, which not only annoys me but also tickles my OCD bone in an unfriendly way.

Long story short: If you don't want to simply keep all your episodes it seems to me that the user is required to delete every episode he already listened to, which in turn makes the "all episodes" tab pretty useless and dumb. Am I correct in thinking this? Or does anyone of you actually have a nice way of managing podcasts, including the podcasts app on the iphone?

I've found that iTunes never reliably deletes podcast episodes. So I just delete them manually.

This is old, but I was trying to figure this out too and noticed that if you right click a podcast on iTunes 11, there's an option called "Show All Available Episodes" which, it seems, restores the entire list of available episodes. Silly that you have to do this (in my opinion deleting a podcast file should just restore the Download button on the side of the podcast entry, same as iTunes Match), but this at least helps to 'reset' the state of that podcast in your iTunes library.

Hope this helps.