ed,
Your understanding is correct. Let me provide you some more details:
HSS means hierarchichal scan synthesis or bottom-up synthesis flow. This makes use of the scan information of DFT inserted blocks as CTL model (core test language). For chip level scan integration, instead of netlist we can use the CTL models.
SCANDEF files are used for scan chain reordering by back-end tools. It consists of stub chains for reordering. In HSS flow by using CTL models, SCANDEF has subblock scan segments as black boxes. Here we would only be able to perform repartitioning considering segment as a whole. For reordering the cells in the segment, we can use '-expand_elements' option of 'write_scan_def' command.