I completely agree. If you want to type text and then turn it into a bulleted list, I agree that you need to highlight and either use the edit bar icon or the keyboard shortcut.
I was simply pointing out there is another way of doing it in case that helps, and then in the second post, correcting your misunderstanding of how the auto formatting method works.
I'm not sure that there really is a standard that all software, except EN, follows. MS Word for example using ctrl+shift+L for a bulleted list.