If you have say 9 elements in your grid, and you set the pivot to center (non-TopLeft) and use the Smooth Tween option on the grid, the first element will be put instantly in the Top Left corner.
It looks to be that it measures whether a SpringPosition should be used, before it applies the origin offset.
The quick and dirty fix is to remove the SqrMagnitude check in UIGrid.cs:371 which means the center element will tween from 0,0,0 to 0,0,0, so not a terrible loss.