As you discovered, you can configure the client to work in the way that you want. But this sounds like your server needs some tweaking.
The issue was that I wanted to use a local caching name server, forwarding to the nameservers offered by the DHCP server. Ideally an updated named.conf would be written, not resolv.conf. But I decided to forgo forwarding and just make it use root hints. I had it secondary the local LAN's zone file so that it could resolve local names.