What the print preview (what you get when you hit the print icon for a worksheet or handout) does, is try to distribute "extra" space as equitably as possible among the pages required to show all the content. This makes a lot of sense if you specify @workspace on element, since adding a little workspace to each element would be better than keeping all the workspaces exactly as authored an having a big chunk of workspace on the last page.
If you authored each element inside the worksheet, then you could use the <page> element to control pages. But there isn't any way to do this if you are using a list-of mechanism.
I think a reasonable question would be whether the current behaviour should be modified if no workspace is given. I think that wouldn't be impossible to add to the logic here, but it would be a few days or weeks before it gets implemented.