Your taste about which kind of bullet or numbering is personal. So developers chose not to impose their views upon you. I admit it is a bit weird to have List n and Numbering n* paragraph styles without the expected “decorations”.
But considering paragraph styles (and more generally styles in any category, character, page, frame, list) are in fact a way to meta-annotate your text with author’s idea of significance, it makes sense to apply List n or Numbering n even without bullet or numbering because you want these paragraphs to have “list item” semantics.
All you have to do is to attach a list style to the paragraph style (Outline & List
tab).
List n are intended for bullet lists and Numbering n for numbered lists.
The variants for given n are supposed to be linked to the same list style, e.g. List 1, List 1 Start, List 1 Cont. and List 1 End to Bullet -. Usually they’ll differ in spacing above and below.
What “<nothing>”, Start, Cont. and End stand for is left to your imagination. I use Start for the first item in a list, Cont. for the running ones and Last for the last item with spacings set so that the list as a whole is relatively “compact” with more spaces above the first item and below the last one. List n is used for single item lists (may seem weird but this may happen, mostly with numbered items when the various “clauses” are separated by non-list paragraphs).
For a more general discussion, read this question. Note that I changed my routine since then and I now no longer use List n Cont. or List n for unnumbered entry because it is “easier” to create an unnumbered item by pressing Bksp at the beginning of the item, thus keeping an uninterrupted List n Cont. sequence.
Last, why aren’t the variants derived from List n or Numbering n instead of being independent?
I filed bug tdf#68263 to report a completely messy behaviour when paragraph styles are linked to a list style. Presently, you can’t unfortunately derive List n or Numbering n variants from a paragraph style which is already associated with a list style. Wait for bug solution.