Hammy -
I ran out of patience to play with the remote to answer the question myself, so I asked hoping someone already knew. Thank you for the quick response. In playing with the remote as much as I did and was willing, I do think I became pretty knowledgeable with it (with the exception of my original question). I do understand how to program the hard buttons and that to make a button global, you have to learn the button over and over for every device. It still does not make sense to do it this way though. The Pronto is much easier: If I configure the hard buttons globally in just one spot, and I want the buttons to act different on any device or several devices, I can easily set the buttons on those devices differently (overriding the global settings). I don't think I'm missing something here.....It just plain makes more sense to do it this way. And for the life of me, I can't figure out why the NEO is different.

Also, in regard to aliasing the hard button (volume in your example), I had the same experience you mentioned with one TV's volume but not with another. I found aliasing all hard buttons to learned or coded soft buttons works best. In many cases where I initially aliased a hard button to another learned hard button, those links were gone after uploading or re-opening the same NCF file. This doesn't happen when aliasing all hard buttons to learned soft buttons. And you only have to learn any one code once.