So I received the answer from Support, which turned out to be Dmitri again. So that was an interesting detour. LOL. Anyway, for those of you that may read this, here is the official answer:
"The way it works is that members are redirected to member-only section after login (aka restricted section). (And if there are more than one accessible to this member, system just uses the first one it can find, usually in order of creation)
The original thinking behind this is that member-only section is the 'true' homepage for members since your main homepage is for everybody, including public.
So for now there is no way to change this behavior, sorry. (One of the ideas we are analyzing for the future is enabling to customize after-login page for each membership level.)"
This, above all other issues I have run into with WA, is the biggest disappointment for us. It really destroys our menu system and the look of our site. It also totally confuses new users who login to the site only to arrive at a seldom used section. There are several reasons why this is not good design logic on WA's part.
First, WA allows for multiple Restricted Access/Member's Only sections. So the fact that the system just picks the first one it can find and explodes its view to second-level menu items makes no sense. The Member's Only menu tree that it opens by default for our site has numerous second-level menu items and ruins the hierarchy of the site. I am not sure of the purpose for the new flyout menu templates if WA is going to pick menus to open by default.
Also, the real Home page of our site is where we welcome new users, post alerts and important announcements, and a whole bevy of other information that changes from day to day. The Member's Only section that WA selected to display for us is a seldom used, static section of the site. New users will simply get lost upon login and wonder why we switched from our old site to a new, confusing site.
Lastly, it has been well known for a hundred or so years that a web site's main URL takes the user to the site's home page. WA says, "The original thinking behind this is that member-only section is the 'true' homepage for members". But WA does not allow us to delete the "other" home page. And what about sites like ours where almost every section is a restricted access section (except for the home page, of course)? In order to get new users to see the dynamic info posted on our true home page, I will have to delete all existing restricted access sections, create a new restriceted access section that duplicates of our actual home page, and then recreate all the restricted user sections. I am not thrilled about trashing 40 or more hours of work just to get back to basic home page functionality. Nor am I thrilled about duplicating efforts to keep up 2 home pages.
I really hope that WA re-evaluates the way this "functionality" works.