Why do the particles in my keyed particle system not hit 2 of the 8 faces of the target mesh?

Question

Why do the particles in my keyed particle system not go to 2 of the 8 faces of the target mesh?

I made the target mesh by duplicating the original 1 face 8 times and rotating them so they'd all be in a circle.

They all appear to be one considered 1 object by Blender when in Edit mode, but when in Object mode, 2 of the 8 faces are not:

Then, when I play the animation, particles do not go to those 2 faces (except for that one lone particle that goes to the uppermost face):

This is even weirder: if I duplicate a face that is getting hit by parcitles, move it very near some of the faces that aren't receiving particles, then those faces start getting hit!

Here is my blend file.

Answer 1

If I understand keyed particles correctly, they are particles whose position gets interpolated between a start particle of one particle system and a goal particle which belongs to another particle system. I guess something with the matching of the start and the goal particle goes wrong. I guess this is a bug.
To solve this problem, you can disable "Even Distribution" in your goal particle system:

The result looks like it should:

Considering the faces that seem to be unselected in Object mode: If you disable 'Only Render' in the display settings all faces are marked in object mode. Otherwise only the particles are painted in orange, but since the two faces do not get any particles, they don't light up.

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Edit: The distribution also works correctly when you set Emit From to "Verts". But then it will only target the vertices of the faces, and that is probably not what you want.