Hello,
The activate actually works, but it may not look so. As an example, to better understand this, assign a button to the Activate Plug-in for the compressor of the selected track, set it to toggle mode and then open the channel strip and the window of the compressor. You will see that upon activating, the levels are updated, while when deactivating they do not respond.
The Edit Plug-in does not work, and there’s a reason for that, I guess. Except from the Compressors and the Maximizer, no other strip plug-in has a dedicated window to open. Don’t ask me why it doesn’t open the window for the ones that do have one, I simply don’t know. However, I have to guess that the logic of the channel strip is to control fast what we want, and just another open window won’t offer that much. Most of the time, we even barely open the Channel Settings Window while using our controllers, at least that’s the case with me. As you correctly stated, we use them “blindly”.
I understand that you thought that the activate plug-in was supposed to actually load a plug-in, but this is not the case as I’ve written previously. Note that even if it did this, it should load a “default” one, while except from the Noise Gate, all other slots can have different plugins.
One way to achieve this, is to have a saved track preset with the strip effects loaded. You can even have a template of such track presets as you most probably already know.
Another way, way less straight-forward, is to use MCU commands, but this involves scripting so I wouldn’t recommend it, since you obviously work with the assistant. If, however, you’re into scripting, I could provide details on this one.
I somehow think that my feature-request for inserts, etc, actually should cover the case of strip effects: