Question, though: if a lem were to fall into an "UP" field, would they "land" and then walk on the field...?
Yes; the question is whether they would splat if the drop is sufficiently high, because they're technically not landing on terrain.
Likewise, it would be debatable which skills you can assign while walking on a one-way-up field that has no terrain beneath it.
a) You could say you can only assign skills that you could also assign to Fallers and Swimmers - i.e. permanent skills, lethal skills, and Cloners. This would mean though that you, among others, can't assign Walkers to them - which would be weird, considering that you would still see the lemmings walking. Blockers wouldn't work either. So aside from Cloners - or lemmings falling onto the up-field from both sides - it would still somewhat act like a one-way-left or -right field, because lemmings couldn't be turned around on it. The difference would be that walking on an up field wouldn't actively turn anyone around, so you could indeed have lemmings facing in both directions walking on it. They would simply have to keep their direction until they're on solid ground again.
b) You could make the case that the lemmings are Walkers, i.e. you can assign any skill to them that you could assign to a Walker - i.e. practically every skill. This would also include that you can make them Platformers anytime, because they're not on flat terrain. This could actually become relevant, because a Platformer's bridge would indeed seal up the one-way-up field, allowing no further lemmings to pass through from below. (At least not by climbing / building etc.; Lemmings can obviously "ascend" through Platformer bridges, since they're only 1 pixel thick).
At this point I'd like to ask you again how this "Reacher jumping through Platformer bridges" trick that you mentioned works?
The thread where I originally asked this question was closed by namida, because the main issue discussed there had been settled.
In any case, assigning Builders while passing through such a field would not be a problem, because the lemming stands on solid terrain (his own staircase), and Builders don't require terrain beneath their feet anyway in order to continue - technically not even during initial Builder assignment, as evident by the flying-Builder trick (Diggers and Builders assigned in succession, with the Builder being assigned when the Digger already no longer has any terrain beneath his feet).
b) seems more useful and more intuitive to me, personally. It would allow the field to act as one-way terrain, permeable from beneath, solid from above.This of course raises the question whether it should be possible to shimmy along a one-way down field. My instinctive response would be no. But then again, this was precisely why solid ceilings were abolished in New Formats, because they were technically not terrain, so having something solid but not being able to use the Shimmier on it would have been inconsistent.
My argument for "you can't shimmy along one-way-down" fields would be that you can't climb up a one-way-left or -right field from the other side either. With solid level sides, you obviously could climb those. So this would be my reasoning why one-way fields in general act differently than level sides.