Mixed Type Array Bug?

Has this always resulted in what smells like a parsing bug, related to strings in a mixed-type array? I thought I'd used this technique to capture mixed-type User Settings in an Array before without an issue. Now, my strings include the double quotes! Maybe this was always the case. Maybe this is even intentional? This code shows that strings render properly when the Array only contains Strings. But gets screwed up if there is another type element in the Array.

Ugh. Do I need to use CIQ substring processing to strip the quotes and extract just the string value?