Parent category displays incorrect / inactive data when managing categories and also one the front end when 'Is Anchor' is used?

I think your problem is related to this one: Change Magento product status in different store views - it's impossible to have a product en/disabled in different StoreViews, this only works on different websites.

Looks like Magento doesn't care if the categories are disabled, because the parent is an anchor it just displays what it's got.

The cleanest solution would be to create different websites, not StoreViews, and have a different Category Tree for each one. I'm doing this at one of my client sites, and apart from managing four Category Trees it's not that much extra work.

Regards, Ingo