You can access the Quick Access shortcuts via a toolbar or menu and they will act that way. But if they are accessed via the folder tree, the tree won't jump to their real locations until you go into a subfolder; otherwise it would make it difficult to go from one of your QA folders to another, or if you clicked the wrong one by mistake.
To add the list of Quick Access folders to a toolbar or menu, create an item which runs this command where you want the list to be:
Go /quickaccess FOLDERCONTENT=norecurse,nofiles
Looking at File Explorer, by default it behaves similar to Opus, except it also won't adjust the folder tree when you go into a subfolder. But I see the behavior you describe if I turn on Expand to open folder in Explorer's options dialog.