unexpected behavior when clicking "Open in iTunes" after manual deletion of podcast in iTunes

I'm running a 3 year old laptop with limited space available so I frequently prune the hard drive for space, specifically my iTunes movies and podcasts.

I created a feedcast, then sync'd to iTunes.
In Textcast, if I select the feed and click "Open in iTunes", iTunes becomes the front app and shows me the podcast tree, as expected.
In Textcast, if I select on a single podcast and click "Open in iTunes", iTunes becomes the front app and shows me the selected podcast, as expected.

I then deleted the top level of the feed in iTunes (deleting all, not just a single one).

If I selected the feed in Textcast and click "Open in iTunes", iTunes takes over and the feed is regenerated. This is awesome and what I was hoping would happen.

However, if I delete the top level in iTunes and then back in Textcast select a single podcast and click "Open in iTunes" nothing happens.

I was expecting it to regenerate the podcast tree in iTunes and select the specific podcast.

The picture attached illustrates what I mean by "top level" and "podcast tree" since I may not be clear