Thanks Daniel.
I stumbled upon a solution and I believe its an oracle-specific issue. When connected with Oracle database, the configured table names specified SHOULD be in ALL CAPS for it to be consistently recognized across multiple liquibase runs (first time setup & subsequent attempts to migrate).
As mentioned earlier, when running similar scenario against postgres database - the configured liquibase control table names are not case sensative, i.e., it works appropriately across multiple liquibase runs even when the table names are specified is in small case.
Since Liquibase uses JDBC connectivity to perform its operations using the database-specific driver - I assume its safe to attribute this behavior to ojdbc7.jar (oracle driver I specified in the classpath when performing liquibase operations against Oracle database).