vim improperly displaying text when loaded in gnome-terminal with altered geometry

I use the following command to load vi(m) in a new gnome-terminal window with altered geometry:

gnome-terminal --geometry 156x48+80+50 -e "/usr/bin/vi .bashrc"

About 60% of the time, when I do this, it loads the text within vim as follows:

1. The top line of text seems to be the next line after the line of text that would have been displayed as the last line had I started vim in the default sized gnome-terminal window
2. After what seems to be the text normally displayed below that offset, after what seems to be the number of lines displayed as if it were in a default sized gnome-terminal window, the remaining lines are blank
3. The only way to correct the display is to scroll down until a full screen of text is normally displayed in vi(m), then everything starts working normally

Note that this behavior happens only around 60-70% of the time - sometimes, issuing the command will work correctly, sometimes as described above. It is very repeatable though on my machine.

This behavior happens on my native Ubuntu 14.04 box as well as on my 14.04.1 box within a virtual machine under Windows 8.1 (both for hyper-v and vmware)

The reason I think it may be vim, not gnome-terminal, is that nano, irssi and the man pages all work fine every time when I issue the same command but substitute them inside the quotes above.

***** EDIT ****
Further investigation may seem to point to vte3 (libvte).

Looking at vte.c in the Gnome vte3 (libvte) source code from their git repo, the default number of lines for a terminal is hardcoded to be 24 lines and the terminal widget appears to be set to this size during the call to vte_terminal_init(). This is the same number of lines displayed before starting the blank lines going to the bottom of vim within the gnome-terminal
****** End EDIT *****

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: vim-tiny 2:7.4.052-1ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.13.0-32.57-generic 3.13.11.4
Uname: Linux 3.13.0-32-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.6
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Wed Feb 4 02:35:03 2015
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/vim.tiny
InstallationDate: Installed on 2015-02-02 (1 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Release amd64 (20140722.2)
SourcePackage: vim
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)