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Another reason why pre-service teachers need to have a logical system that they can get their heads around. If my students can learn it, so can they. Same goes for in-service teachers coming in for a re-tread.
I believe that your students understood the concept as you presented it in your course. I'm seeing this from a different perspective, which is working with teachers who have taken physics in HS and college, and are now trying to teach their students. The teachers I work with exhibit a great deal of confusion on the issue, and are therefore transmitting their confusion to their students. They are faced with a curriculum that gives the moon-earth difference to explain mass and weight, yet many have learned something conflicting in their physics courses. I am not at all worried about students who will continue to study physics or whose goal is to "get it" in the one physics course they take. The ones who study more physics can adjust to different reference frames and different definitions by different authors, and it doesn't matter for students who will never deal with the issue beyond the course they are taking.