Your concept of "starting from a position of true/false" is leading
you to faulty logic.  The statements made so far about the meaning of
deep-equal, including yours, have used the XPath "every" operator,
about which the XPath 2 spec (section 3.9, subpoint 2) states
(emphasis mine):

"If the quantifier is every, the quantified expression is true if
every evaluation of the test expression has the effective boolean
value true; otherwise the quantified expression is false. This rule
implies that, __if the in-clauses generate zero binding tuples, the
value of the quantified expression is true__."

Michael Kay
Saxonica