This is bizzare. I set my view to "show complete" and all the MEP stuff in my model behaves accordingly: new does not look any different than existing, but the new architectural elements (in the link) still show up darker than existing. It behaves this way whether the link is set to "by host view", "by linked view", or "custom". When set to "custom" it behaves this way whether the Phase Filter is set to "by host view (show complete" or overridden to just "show complete".
I cannot recreate this problem in a separate model. I created a new model and a new link and drew some walls, I can set the link to "show complete" by any of the methods described above. But in the real model, nothing works for some reason. Any ideas?