Long story short: there is something different happening internally when you create a reference plane subcategory via the UI versus any other method (copy/paste, transfer project stds, API, etc). The UI is somehow applying a setting specifically to reference plane subcategories that makes line patterns scale to the screen resolution. Any other method of creating a RP subcat misses that step/setting and the line patterns become scaled to the model (and of course, this 'setting' doesn't seem to be exposed by the API).
At a minimum, this bug needs to be fixed on copy/paste and transfer project standards...but ultimately the API also needs to expose the ability to create reference plane subcategories 'correctly'.