I am fully aware of what an instance is as opposed to an independent copy. This is not differnt from any other 3D software I've worked with. In Solid Works , or Geomagic Design that terminology does not even come up. In Blender they are called linked copies and you can choose which of the features you want linked to the original. Very nifty by the way !
I understand that the original top level instance and the patterns instance refer to the same data, but so is every other instance. That's the concept of an instance. However, if I instance a single component , the new instance gets a differnt number.
I am assuming that Fusion does not do that for the component and subassembly instances in a patterned top level assembly so as to maintain the relations e.g. Joint constraints between these parts and subassemblies within that top level assembly. That makes sense!
If that is so by design, then there is a bug with creating a selection set. You did not answer that part of my message.
iIn the design you can see in the screenshot I've created three selection sets. The two I want to talk about are "Roll Eyes" and "Apples"
These indicate two variants of a design for this lighting system.
The selection set "Apples" refers to components that are all either differnt components or are top level such as "Apple - leaf:1" and "Apple - leaf:2"
All of th components in that selection set have differnt instance names. When I hide that selection set as expected all components in that selection set are hidden.
The second selection set is created from two components. "Gator board -disk:1" in "Carrier assy:1" and "Gator board -disk:1" in "Carrier assy:2". When I hide that selection set, only one instance of the gator board is hidden. It is certainly not expected behavior when an operation on a set is not applied to all componets in that set.
It may have been an incorrect conclusion on my part to attribute this issue to the instance naming topic described above.