Jasey,
I cannot shed any light on to why they are different, but I can explain the "long string of letters and numbers".
Behind the scenes, everything in Genesys Cloud is identified by what is known as a Globally Unique IDentifier (GUID) which is that string you refer to. You will see Interaction IDs look like this. If you open up the definition of a user, or a Queue (or just about anything!) from the Admin page, you will see them embedded within the URL.
Do you have the CLI utilities installed? If so, you can export a list of just about anything to translate GUIDs into names (or vice versa). If not, you can use the API, but then you will have to do some manipulation to convert the JSON into something more human-friendly.
I will leave it to others to explain the inconsistent behavior.
HTH
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Paul Simpson
Eventus Solutions Group
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