Bug: color picker and normal channels

I want to create a macro that picks values from the normal pass. I've added a ColorControl using the UserControls script. Seems like there's a bug though since the values that get picked from the normal channel are incorrect.

In the following screenshot I've added a couple of other sliders to test this. As you can see, the picked values match what the color inspector subview is showing - except for NX, NY and NZ (the unlabeled sliders at the bottom are the world position pass)

color_picker_normals.png (49.33 KiB) Viewed 1422 times

At first I thought that the color inspector normalizes NX, NY and NZ automatically and the color picker just shows the tiny raw values that are in fact stored in the normal channels. However, this isn't the case. If I copy white into the normal channels using a ChannelBoolean, the color picker returns 0.0000152590219 for each of the three channels (the subview of course shows 1.0 for NX/NY/NZ)

Here's a related behavior that looks like a bug:

When picking normals or world position directly from the 3D viewport, the normal/position Z coordinate isn't being picked properly. For normals it's always zero and for position it seems like negative values are being clamped. And on a large segment of the test sphere the x/y/z normals were locked to 0/90/0. The tooltip shows Z depth instead of PosZ/NZ. Maybe that's (part of) the problem?

pick_normals_and_position.jpg (80.78 KiB) Viewed 1365 times

The sliders were created as user controls with some manual editing as described here.