As I and others have repeated ad nauseam, as long as your directories
and such are correctly specified to the project settings, as far as I
know, it just works.

Indeed. My concern is that I don't know why my directories are correctly specified to the project settings. They certainly aren't correct in 'Additional Include Directories' and 'Additional Library Search Paths'. As I said before I have no reference to boost in the project settings at all. And yet it works. Hence the head scratching.