Haha, I hope you don’t mind my highlighting past mistakes, but since it’s interesting and might help you or someone else be confident about it (and since it’s a little nostalgic for me)…
It seemed like what you instinctively wanted to do with 逆にX, especially when the expectation being contravened was only implied, is to interpret it as meaning that the opposite of X happened.
So in the clearest example I saw looking back in the thread,
boy our posts make you wish ctrl-F didn’t snap to the forum search bar huh
Miu was describing a gracious gesture Rika made (Rika put the belt she’d just lost to Miu on for her), and she said:
それがなんか逆に怖くて
with your initial translation being:
“That’s like the opposite of scary”
When rather she was saying it was scary, in contrast to the intention of the gesture.
(“that was strangely scary” would be a quick attempt at a translation)
The dictionary definition and examples all show that for 逆にX, X itself isn’t reversed - it’s the expectations/intentions/rhetorical structure around it that’s being reversed in some way.
Alas, I might never get to explain that mistake again… 
It’s a fun one!