Hi Anthony,
I am not sure whether the following section in documentation is relevant to the behavior you were referring to.
When an ellipsis (...) is present but has no size (i.e. replaces zero :) the result will still always be an array. A view if no advanced index is present, otherwise a copy.
Here, ...replaces zero :
Advanced indexing always returns a copy of the data (contrast with basic slicing that returns a view). And I think it is a view that is returned in this case.
>>> a = array([1])
>>>a
array([1])
>>>a[:,0] # zero : are present
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
IndexError: too many indices for array
>>>a[0] = 3
>>>a[(0,)] = 4
>>>a[:
array([1])