I believe this could be considered a bug since the behavior is not how joomla is intended to function. Because I am still waiting for position-7 to collapse when not in use, I need to create a second copy of Elegant and then edit out position-7 in the second copy, so that I can use it with some content that needs full span. When I use the Template manager>Template>Elegant>Copy Template, I get an error:
Warning
JInstaller: :Install: File does not exist /home/site/public_html/tmp/template_copy_562a827f924a6/en-GB.tpl_elegant.ini
Template Install: Could not copy files from the files source.
Error
Error installing template
Unable to install new template from temporary folder.