OK, I see what you are saying now, and after a little experimenting I see where you are coming from with the older pictures. Here's a high-level of what I was able to see for Deletions:
1. If you delete any photo or video that is less than 30 days old from either Photos or Albums, it deletes it from both places and puts it in "Recently Deleted" with the message that it will remove it from the Photo Stream on all your devices (Photo Stream meaning any photos that are less than 30 days old and which are shared with other devices and computers that have the same iCloud account and have Photo Stream turned on).
* This is only for photos or videos in either Photos or Albums. If you delete a photo or video that is less than 30 days old from a Shared album, it appears to only delete it from the Shared album.
2. If you delete a photo or video that is older than 30 days old from an Album, it deletes it from the Album only with the message that it will be removed from the album, but not your Photo Library and does not put it in "Recently Deleted". (so, here is where you issue is - because if you want it gone - then you have to do number 3 below).
3. If you delete a photo or video that is older than 30 days old from Photos, it deletes it from Photos and from any album it is in (except Shared Albums) with the message that this photo will also be deleted from an Album.
4. If you Restore a photo in the "Recently Deleted" and then delete it again, it doesn't appear that you get any message (even if it is less than 30 days old)
5. Items in "Recently Deleted" are actually just items in another album. On your Mac or PC, if you look in Photo Stream, you will still see them in the Photo Stream until you delete them from the "Recently Deleted" album on your iOS device (and that is only if they have not yet been imported to iPhoto automatically or manually, of course).
Now while experimenting I was doing a lot of deletes and restores, so I'm guessing that what I am about to say next is probably due to that, but the messages that I listed above don't always show. Sometimes it would just put the item into "Recently Deleted" with no message. It's all a learning curve at this point. But I can see where you might have issues with the need to go through a lot of photos to find the one (or ones) you want to delete. I did find, however, that it was easier to do this when I located a general timeframe or group of photos that might need deleting, then went to the Moments view (which was large enough to see the photos). If there were a group of them I wanted to delete, the Select function allowed me to tap on the ones I wanted, to scroll up and down to other timeframes/photo sets and select those and so forth. Of course, if you have albums with photos from all over the place time-wise, then it would be more difficult. But, with the Camera Roll, you would have the same issue since it was in chronological order as well....
Cheers,
GB
