Calendar sync settings between iPhone & MBP screwup podcast syncs!

Question

Really surreal:  when I needed to access a 2nd microsoft exchange account to my phone, iTunes suddenly said that syncing calendars would now change many of my calendar items--even though I told it I did not want to sync to that exchange account's calendar.  So to avoid the inevitable screwing up of all of my repeated events on all of my other calendars, while waiting to hear back from Apple (which is almost certainly a hopeless endeavor at this point, to find a solution to this, because they really couldn't care less about the kind of use to which I put my calendar), I stopped autosyncing the phone, and when I want to sync, I first click 'replace calendar data on phone with data from the computer for this sync only', then sync.  And guess what?  My podcasts that I listen to on the phone weren't showing as listened to in iTunes after each sync.  So they aren't being deleted as they should be (default settings are 'only keep unplayed podcasts). 
I have played with the settings repeatedly to verify this--if I do not first click 'replace calendar data on phone with that from computer' and just sync, I first see the 'this is going to mess up a bunch of calendar items, do you want to do this?' and click 'sync calendar later', and then the rest of the sync seems to go normally and I see the plays reflected in the iTunes list of podcasts.  If I leave the 'replace calendar data' checked, the play data does not cross over.
What a weird buggy thing iTunes is.  And so frustrating that security issues with my workplace trap me with hard-wired sync via iTunes.
Besides recreating all of my repeated events (that's going to be quite a few hours work to recreate the repeated items, and then to verify the out-of-pattern repeats with work schedules, the kind of thing that is likely to cause me to end up in the wrong place at the wrong time), anyone have any idea how to avoid this bizarre problem?
MBP unfortunately updated to 10.8.4
iTunes 11.0.4
iPhone on iOS 6.1.3

Answer 1

Gave up, synced calendars, spent several hours verifying calendar item dates, what lovely way to spend my time, and podcasts plays are syncing again.  Just surreal.