There is something more with org-outline-level in org-version 6.31a
which I still don't understand because I am not aware of some
functions used in its implementation. I drilled down the quite special
situation to the following file content. I hope that the indentation
of x by three spaces does not get lost in the mailing list archive:
-*- eval: (org-mode) -*-
x
After opening this file and confirming `eval', org-outline-level
reports `3' (changes when changing the indentation of x) but I expect
it to report someting like `0', `1000' or `1001' or similar like it
does with variations like e. g.
-*- mode: org -*-
x
The function assumes that the cursor is located at the beginning