stereo bus not stereo?

Thanks for the quick responses! I thought about the reverb throwing it off but here's a screenshot of a sound effect panned hard left, then going into the bus and coming out straight up the middle (notice the lines that show where the levels just were: all left channel on the plunger track, totally even on the bus track):

I've got dozens of tracks, some mono some stereo, some wavs and some virtual instruments all going through the same bus. I'm not sure about how to set up tracks like you mentioned aside from making them mono or stereo and panning them. For reference here's another shot of my mixer (there are a ton of tracks so here's just the end of it):

Thanks for any help. I'm self taught so if I'm going about this a dumb way please let me know. I welcome and celebrate your condescension! 🙂

Same thing-- straight up the middle. I am befuddled!

chorleyman, is there a way to choose that option without using the sends (I'm using track output -> bus 2 -> stereo out)? Seems like it should automatically preserve all pan/volume/plugin information the way I'm doing it but maybe not.

Pancenter-- I don't know how to view bus channel strips. I've always just created aux strips and used buses to route things in and out, didn't even know they had their own viewable channel strips. Can't figure out how to view them but maybe that's the answer.

Thanks folks

Weird-- I can't find that dropdown menu. In my mixer I've got Edit, Options, and View, none of which have any submenus that allow me to open a bus channel strip. In fact the only kind of track I can create from within the mix window is an aux track. I can create a new aux track and choose bus input, but I've tried that already and there wasn't any difference.

Ok-- this is the same as what I see when I create a new Aux strip with a bus input or output (like in my mixer screenshot above). Still not understanding the difference between a Bus channel strip and an Aux channel strip with bus input/output. Same thing methinks.

Regardless you'll be happy to know I've isolated the culprit. The Logic ambient loop 'Factory and Machines 01' is surround, and even after you switch its output to stereo the track's level meter is still divided into 5 lines instead of two. Every other track when i switched the output from surround to stereo the readout/track info followed suit. This one didn't change and for some reason running it through the bus made the whole bus mono regardless of effects or other tracks. Taking it out made everything work properly. So I guess it's just a bug with that specific sound or maybe I just need to be extra careful from now on to watch what happens when i change a surround track's output and do all that before assigning it to a bus. Good to know. Luckily it's just background ambient noise that doesn't necessarily need to be a part of the fx bus so I can live with this little bug. Hopefully in the next version of Logic they'll do a better job of resolving the different mono/stereo/surround conflicts as these have been my only real complaint about Logic vs the Protools i came from. The process of bouncing a mono summed wav is so much more complicated than it needs to be and is similarly full of mysterious quirks and bugs.

Thanks to everybody for helping me try to figure this out! Really appreciate it.