I wasn't bringing up the ECE thing.

I meant illusory in the same sense that "sure, the force of gravity can cause me to fall down and get ouchies... but by a bit of a coordinate change and so on, we can see that there really is no 'force', but instead that it's all just geometry and curvature and such. Gravity is real, but the 'force' of gravity is an illusion. There's a deeper physical principle that gives rise to the effect, and the regular 'force' more or less amounts to summing up all the curvature between here and there."

My understanding was that gauge bosons are similar "we observe this forces/fields/etc... but actually, we don't need to explicitly postulate those fields as existing. Instead, we can simply state that these other fields obey these symmetries, and that produces the same results. Obviously, to figure out which symmetries are the ones that actually are valid, we have to look at how the universe actually behaves"

ie, my understanding is that if you deleted from your mind the knowledge of the electromagnetic and nuclear forces and instead just knew about the quark and lepton fields and the symmetries they obeyed, then the forces of interaction would automatically "pop out". One would then see behaviors that looks like photons, gluons, etc, but the total behavior can be described without explicitly adding them to the theory, but simply taking all the symmetries of the other stuff into account when doing the calculations.

That's what I was asking about. Is this notion correct, or did I manage to critically fail to comprehend something?

And thanks for taking the time to explain this, btw. :) (I'm just trying to figure out if I've got a serious misconception here, and if so, to clear it up)