Why does "Recent Places" not include most recent places I have seen others asking about this but have never seen a good answer.

The idea of Recent Places or Recent Items is a good one, and is found in many contexts, operating systems, and softwares. However, in OS X it seems that usually a recently accessed file or folder is not in the list. 

I have found this an annoyance since converting to Mac in February 2009. The problem has persisted through Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, and Mountain Lion.

Why is this so? It is really hit or miss whether something is there.

As a workaround, it would be nice to know what you have to do to "get something in the list." As an example, does it have to be done in Finder? Or does it have to change the metadata? Or what?

If I knew the workaround, it might be easy enough to always "do that thing" so that the expected entry in Recent Places is created.
To make something appear in the "Recent Places" dropdown (I've had the same annoying problem), it seems like you need to travel to that particular folder twice before it appears there. If you do that, you'll see it appears there. I guess the obvious reason is that Apple assumes if you go to a folder recently only once, that isn't enough to store it. But if you go there twice, that means you should have that stored. Makes sense, but there has to be some kind of workaround, because in a lot of real-life situations, this kind of functionality is really inconvenient. Sometimes I go to a folder twice if I know I will want to access it quickly soon. I'm sure there are solutions out there.