If I Solo Defeat a group, the channels feeding it stay muted. This also happens in the opposite direction: if you SD a channel the group stays muted.
I’m tempted to suggest it’s simply a matter of fixing things so that SD is applied throughout the chain, although it probably isn’t.
“Solo defeat” is supposed to stop a track from being muted when something else is being soloed. Is that not what you experience?
Solo and solo defeat are no techniques to build up on a mix. It was made for listening to a mix. Not more, but not less.
Yes indeed, that’s how it works.
It works with solo not mute.
I guess it’s an expectation, not expierience.
I was hoping that it would allow me to hear all the vocals against any solo, for instance, but if that’s not how it’s intended to work then I suppose that’s not how it’s intended to work.
Cheers for chipping in! 
Can you explain what you are trying to do? Could be worth the effort… 
I’m soloing various guitar parts against a backdrop of percussion and main vocal. The main vocal goes to a group, which I could quite easily SD manually, but I’ve been in situations where the effort unblocking the chain involves quite a bit of work. It just feels like it should behave intuitively i.e. not like this.
Did you check the Listen button?
Sometimes it’s easier to use this.
Well, if you think about it as if the vocals are a part of a group of things, and the group is the representation of the group of things, then I agree with you, it’s not intuitive.
However, if you think about it as if things are independent items that deal with audio it is intuitive. You’re telling the system to not mute any given item that you have solo-defeated, and if the item is a group track then it is what is defeated, not anything else. So it won’t matter if track(s) X feed signal into that item (group), the group is what matters because it is the ‘item’.
Also, think about it this way: Suppose you have a group that receives all percussive elements, so drum kit and percussion, and on that group you may have some EQ or compression or whatever. You now solo-defeat the group. What would you like the system to do when you solo the drum kit tracks? Of course the group has to remain unmuted so you can hear the kit, but what about the percussion tracks? If it is as you say you want it then all the tracks that feed the group should remain unmuted, right? So soloing the drum kit would also give you the percussion tracks, because they too go into the same solo-defeated group.
If that’s not the behavior you would want you would need to make the system understand when it should provide an exception. So I’m not entirely sure it is as intuitive as you might think once we get to the point of trying to figure out an actually consistent technical logical behavior.
Or maybe I’m missing something (late night yesterday)…
No, I don’t think you are, that was a very comprehensive answer (late nights can be very productive, can’t they ). There was a bit of conceptual dissonance going on there for a while, now resolved, thank you all