I believe your analysis of haltdef may be flawed. You claim it halts 'default behaviour'. I guess further processing (of remote scripts) fits quite nicely within this term 'default behaviour',
Yes I'm claiming it halts default behavior, but I didn't say it was halting further processing, wouldn't make sense since /halt is here.
And Yes the help file is talking about the default text but that would not be the first time there's an error.
because it's so unobvious that you don't even know what I'm talking about
I think I do.
The "is this a joke" part was because you seems to have pretty good knowledge in msl and not beeing able to figure this out is weird.
I still think that haltdef halts more than text, and that's why /echo has some switch to apply highlighting, beep/flash etc but if this is wrong, it's a bug then.