> In the end I declined, as the first interviewer would have been one of the people I'd have managed, and I just did not want to deal with a team with a person like that,

Oh, I can totally empathise with you because I've been there. I applied for a position which was the head of a team and a future direct asked me esoteric statistical questions from his PhD thesis. I did quite well to answer most of them but he wasn't impressed.