SX50HS. Did I allow myself to be misled?

No you were not mislead. Set the camera for Scene Mode on the control dial (SCN). Press Function and set it to High Speed Burst HQ. Before you press Function again, scroll down to the Continuous Shooting setting. Set it for AF Continuous.  In good light that will give you 4.4 fps with focus and viewing between frames. This was explained somewhere in the draft manual that was posted here on this forum before the camera was released...I can no longer find it in the official manual (I have not made an exhaustive search), but it still works. You get up to 10 shots, then the internal memory dumps to card. Try it. It should do the trick.