@MrNinjutsu. There is a button in the top left of the Blender uvlayouut that lets you sync the elements. The one on the left allows you to edit elements independently, but the model has to be selected. In the top left corner of the interface there is a button for syncing selected elements. The mesh doesn't have to be…
box select a single vertex just works as expected.. it just does not set the active element - which makes sense for every selection with more than one element.. but yeah might be an idea to handle the single element case differently - its not like they are not up for ideas ;)
In my previous post I just wanted to point out that the vertex weight values in the panel are just for the active element and not all selected element. Box selection was not the point, just an example.
yeah, individual origins refers to the centers of contiguous selections, not the center of each selected element. Can be non-intuitive, but it is quite useful for some purposes.