Oh, that makes more sense.
For as long as I have been coding FOSIs, context="A" would only find immediate children, and context="* A" is required to find a decendent at any level.
That being said, there has been more than one time where I have researched an older FOSI that I had written a long time ago to make a change, and come across something that I swear shouldn't work, but somehow is.
In moving to 5.4, I had come to learn that depending on the total number of occurrences of a child element, getting the first|notfirst|last|notlast|middle to work consistently between a pair of child elements for one doc, and 3 or more of the same children for other docs was a challenge.