when a cell if set in the element template that is used during a Feature Service query, and the cell is an annotation cell, I want the placed cell to honor that setting.

When you connect to a feature service, it generates an item type for the feature attributes and an element template. if the feature is a point feature, and you update the element template to define a cell, and that cell is set as an annotation cell, then I would expect that the cell placed via feature service query to honor annotation scaling. Currently it does not.