[whpalmer4]

Here's something thing to check: do you have the entire set of contexts selected in the sidebar? The Due Soon built-in perspective doesn't change the selection, just flips you into context mode using whatever selection was there last, so you will get an empty window if you have a context selection consisting only of items with no due dates. Flagged seems to behave the same way. Reasonable people could disagree about whether this behavior is correct (it certainly doesn't seem to be documented to work this way).

My expectation looking at those menu items would be that it would first select all the contexts and then filter, but that doesn't appear to be how it works. What is more troubling is that one might think "oh, if I select the All Items view first, then it will work properly" but that is not the case.

I'm leaning toward the "this is a bug" sentiment, too...for the user most likely to be relying on the built-in views, this is likely to be very unintuitive behavior.