detonate "startat/followat" vs ?

Hi all,

Looking for advice on something I am trying to accomplish.

I am trying to work with MIDI files as a reference to a live performance, and I wish to be able to jump to specific sections in the MIDI file, ideally by specifying the measure/beat/beat-subdivision, ie in PPQ.

I have searched around for 3rd party externals, and have found no better of a solution than trying to manipulate the detonate object to do what I want. Still, I am confused as to why the implementation of detonate's "startat" and "followat" messages are as they are, so I will illustrate with an example:

Suppose you are trying to use detonate for score following and there is a mistake. So you want to engage the "followat" message to recover. You specify the correct starting note, but of course there is probably more than one instance of that note in the score.

In that case, how can you expect "followat" to return the note at the precise location in the score you are picking up from, instead of any of the other same notes elsewhere in the score?

My assumption is the routine searches linearly through the score to find the first note matching the query. This means it is impossible to jump to anywhere besides the first instance of any note?

Hopefully I am confused and there is some intended way of working with these messages that I am unaware of. Thanks for your help.