More testing confirms that the standalone EncFS solution for Mac OS X Lion above and BoxCryptor's solution for iOS 5.1 do not talk to one another and are one-sided/one-dimensional. In the middle stands Dropbox which is the not-yet-so-neutral repository of anything digital. So, if I use the Mac solution and mount my file system, sure, every folder and file I throw in there gets encrypted (and names scrambled) and instantly synced to DB too. An immediate level of security at DB's level. But this approach causes the show to stop in both DB and BC's iOS apps because the files are rendered useless in both; neither app is capable of handling them. In other words, I was expecting to at a minimum be given the option to "Open In BoxCryptor" while in DB's iOS app in order for BC's iOS app to decrypt for me ... but no. This failing (as it did), I was then expecting to grab the encrypted files (scrambled folder and file names are all visible) through BC's iOS app for decryption and viewing there. But again, this was not to be.
(Makes me wonder now what would happen if I turned ON the file name scrambling in my BC app settings --- will the app be able to handle the files with garbled names from my standalone app?).
Conversely, I can upload my UNencrypted files to DB, to my pre-assigned BoxCryptor source folder. Then from the DB iOS app I have to "Open In BoxCryptor" file after file after file (not to mention having to toggle back and forth and back and forth between apps) until everything gets uploaded/encrypted to/by BC and synced back to DB. Sure enough, thereafter they will show up encrypted in DB and without the folder or file names getting scrambled (since I turned that off in my BC settings). And I can happily view them too in my BC iOS app (that is, file types that are supported). But do notice the security hole in here: suppose someone loads a number of unencrypted files to his/her DB/BC folder, but cannot get to them right away through his/her iOS app to encrypt them. In any event, as I stated earlier, my standalone solution for Mac (unsupported, yes) cannot see what I did in iOS even though both point to the same repository in DB (when I mount my File System nothing lives in there - this is, of course, an enhancement for the developers of that app). So for now, it's either one or the other but not both. And here I was under the impression that I was all set to perform a smooth encryption/decryption roundtrip. But indeed it appears that it'll be a bumpy road for a while. If someone has further input and insight into this, I am all ears. Thanks all.