Rene,
Why in this example did you add the permit statement, but in the others you didn’t? You said the permit statement was like a permit any any statement in an ACL, so I guess I’m not clear why you didn’t use this permit statement in every example.
R1(config)#ip prefix-list FILTERTHIS seq 5 deny 172.16.1.0/24
R1(config)#ip prefix-list FILTERTHIS seq 10 permit 0.0.0.0/0 le 32