I noticed that a lot of my folders had suddenly switched to higher view sizes than I had specificied. I was assuming that somehow nautilus had suddenly decided to create per-folder entries for said folders with incorrect view sizes.
So I found this question: How to reset all per-folder view settings in nautilus? I found the folder specified in the answer (~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata) and found that it was actually important to delete the files INSIDE the folder, because for some reason deleting the folder itself didn't work for some reason.
After doing that, I discovered that the odd setting was for the default view settings, not for a handful of files. Nautilus actually handles the per-folder settings like it should, but it ignores the global folder settings. I want Nautilus to, by default, display all non-specified folders as compact view, 50%. My folders are using the compact setting like I want, but they are not down to 50%. At a guess, they are at 100%. Altering the view size of the icon view can set the compact view to 33%, but I'm not sure by what mechanism this functions. I haven't extensively tested the other view sizes because I don't plan on using them much at all.
Next I looked up questions like How do I reset nautilus to the default configuration? I'm expecting the problem to be a corrupted config file or something of the sort, so I hunted down directories like ~/.nautilus, ~/.gconf/apps/nautilus, and ~/.gnome2/nautilus. (I don't have a ~/.nautilus directory, so I'm assuming that's only for older versions.) I attempted to remove the contents of each, but I can't seem to force Nautilus back to default configuration settings. Actually viewing Nautilus's preferences in GConf made the settings look like they were what I wanted them to be, which is odd.
I'd like to force Nautilus to default settings, basically. Though if something else will fix it, I'll take it too. I'm not interested in doing a full uninstall, reinstall of Nautilus if I don't have to.
==EDIT1==
Turns out that Nautilus just writes the settings in GConf for the heck of it. Nautilus only really uses the settings that it stores in DConf. I did gsettings reset-recursively org.gnome.nautilus, which actually did reset Nautilus to default, but it still doesn't like my view size settings.
