I can almost follow that. As a test, I moved the text in your example to the pasteboard layer and applied a soft group with the overlapping rectangle. That provided the proper mouseover actions, but the text was invisible until the rectangle was hovered.

My conclusion is that there's no straightforward way to get the button effect I'm seeking. I'll go back to having the text element in the MouseOff layer so that I don't (later) confuse myself and others.

Thanks for the suggestions.