When you try to combo some corner stairs in snakelike layouts for decorative purposes, some stairs tend to corner outwards (1/4 stair) when expected to corner inwards (3/4). This disallows to loop such layouts into some nice, simple and space-efficient cyclic designs.
Screnshots below depict what happens when you try to build such designs. Shots depicting the root cause of this are also provided below: as you can see, if reconnection of wooden stair is considered legit, brick stair connection is definitely a failure and vice versa.
Same things also happen with upper stairs.
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I believe that contrary to popular belief the actual directional placement of stairs has not changed but only the rendering has so stairs can only be placed North, South, East and West. It's just that when next to other stairs they choose to render an extra 8th of a block making them appear as a corner block.
Knowing this allows for easier placement of stairs and generally allows the majority of patterns to be achievable.
This is the best Mojang can do without allowing some way of toggling behaviours by either a tool, redstone or a simple right click. It would be a very specific tool if implemented and many people may with to use stairs to hide redstone wiring due to their transparent properties but a right click is easily misclicked and can be considered an annoyance.
Stair placement is directionally inconsistent. I was trying to make an octagonal roof. If you follow a pattern of rotational symmetry, (imagine the underlying stair arrangement is like a wiggly swastika) then every corner has one 'one-stair' that should be a 'three-stair'. The errant stair block is shown using quartz steps in the stairbug3 image. Or, you /can/ get two directions 100% correct as per stairbug4, but the other two directions will be wrong, and trying to fix them one block at a time causes the problem to spread until you end up with stairbug3 again.
So it seems the current stair reshaping algorithm can be made to work for N-S /or/ E-W but never for both N-S and E-W at the same time.
Edit: A wrench-like thingy would be sooo useful - fences, glass, stairs, paintings, and anything else orientable. Please consider it!
I don't get exactly what you've tried to build.
Can you attach a screenshot of a setup 4 times bigger made of full blocks ?