Upon reflection, I think my last reply only tells half the story (or maybe less). You keep looking for a neat, rationally comprehensible expression of the Orthodox notion of the 'reception' of a council.
I think you quest is, in the end, just a sign of how different the phronema of our confessions are.
Quite frankly, in rational (or at least humanly rational) terms Orthodox ecclesiology makes no sense at all. We have no central authority, and yet, spread over cultures from the erudite, classically educated elites of the Empire before its fall to the subsistence hunters of the Tlingit, in circumstances as different as the presecution under the Turk and the Bolsheviks, the height of Imperial power, and the immigrant experience in the secularizing West, we confess the same faith, follow the same praxis. Those of us with an intellectual bent still get what all the old disputes were about, why various heresies are wrong, and those without such a bent more often than not have an intuitive sense. (I joke about new Orthodox being issued an "I Spy Book of Heresies".) The Latin church's structure is comprehensible in human terms without consideration of the Holy Spirit, it maps nicely onto feudalism or a corporate organizational chart. Ours, quite simply doesn't, because it really doesn't make any sense at all without the Holy Spirit keeping it all together.
I was wondering how long it would take for someone to just come out and say the obvious! Or to put it in even more tongue-in-cheek terms, an Orthodox chanter on one of our chant discussion forums uses as his tagline the phrase: "I'm not a member of any organized religion -- I'm Orthodox."
Seriously, you did a beautiful job of describing how things are.