During this journey of learning, a few people have spoken to me about this, and in one case (I can't remember which chip it was), I had an issue configuring a two-byte register. It turned out that the datasheet said one thing, but in reality, four of the bits were backasswards. My frustration was through the roof, because I *thought* I was doing everything correctly, but being pretty new to the game, was ready to deskpalm my face.

I don't remember exactly what led me to reversing the bits, but I can definitely understand what you're saying here even though my experience was a lot more mild than yours was.

Lesson was (and is again re-inforced) to never take a datasheet at face value, and if one isn't getting proper results even though they're certain their code is right, the docs may not be completely representative of reality.