The most striking characteristic of a recently proposed class of antisymmetrized optical potentials for elastic nucleus-nucleus scattering is their unconventional dependence on the choice of underlying connected-kernel scattering integral equations. The relationship of these two-cluster effective interactions to the more conventional, essentially formalism-independent, optical potential operator is established in detail. The interrelated attributes of formalism independence, Hermitian analyticity, and reality with respect to elastic unitarity are clarified. A concise wave function version of multiparticle scattering is developed as complementary to a transition operator approach and is used to show that a wave function starting point does not identity a preferred class of antisymmetrized effective interactions. The differences in the calculated elastic transition amplitudes that do arise between conventional optical potentials and those of the formalism-dependent variety when the same approximations are made to the auxiliary dynamical equations are identified.