Ahh, this is why I knew I tried and failed to get this working before.
Basically, the game thinks these states are "pressed" buttons:
Empty hot button - when you go to page 2 and see 6 empty clear hot buttons, those would now look "pressed"
Item on hot button - For some reason, the game ignores the sidl command to use the item <background> ... what is even further maddening is for some reason titanium considers having an Item on your hot button as "pressed"
You can see these two disappointing elements illustrated here (I only set this up to work with hotbutton1, so the others are how you would see it, but hotbutton 1 is how they would all look if we got pressed buttons working.
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Very sad story (3 word submission)