Comment 9 for bug 503052

It wasn't actually a bug, it worked as designed. A papercut is usability nitpicks, simple things we can do to improve the user experience. Which could include fixing an actual bug, if it wasn't working as designed or make minor changes to how it was designed to work.

In this case empathy was designed to always honor it's previous state when launched, regardless of the current conditions. I would argue that when launching in the users session it should stay out of the way and be more of a "service" that is running when you need it.