Downstream report: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=678371 When you edit a value with xfce4-settings-editor, it collapses the entire tree of values you were in and leaves you at the top level. It might be more friendly for it to keep you at the same level and show the value you just changed instead of having to dig back down to look.
I know this is far from optimal but as far as I remember this was imposed by some limitation in xfconf's signals. I have to dig into the code to find out what the limitation was.
Fixed in my branch.