How to add Hugo Taxonomy meta data to Pages CMS

[squidfingers]

I have a Hugo site that adds metadata to Tags using branch bundles in the content directory (See docs).

The content is structured like this:

content/
└── tags/
    ├── _index.md <- I don't want this to show in the list
    ├── tag-1/
    │   └── _index.md
    ├── tag-2/
    │   └── _index.md
    └── tag-3/
        └── _index.md

The current config looks like this:

  - name: tags
    label: Tags
    type: collection
    path: content/tags
    filename: '{fields.params.term}/_index.md'
    fields:
      - name: title
        label: Title
        type: string
        required: true
      - name: body
        label: Content
        type: text
      - name: params
        label: Params
        type: object
        fields:
          - name: term
            label: Taxonomy Term
            type: string
            required: true

I want this metadata editable in the cms, but I can't figure out how to do a few things.

1. The listing page shows all of the directories, and I really just want it to list all of the Term _index.md pages by title.

2. I can't seem to use exclude:[_index.md] to hide content/tags/_index.md from being shown, because it also hides all other the _index.md files in the subfolders. Is there any way to hide the index page for the tags section, without hiding it for all of the child sections?

3. I'd like a little help listing these tags in a Reference field. In my post config, had tried the following config, but it resulted in a blank select menu. I can't really figure out what to do from the docs.

...
  fields:
    - name: tags
      label: Tags
      type: reference
      options:
        collection: tags
        search: title
        label: "{title}"
        value: "{params.term}"

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[squidfingers]

I've added workarounds for 2 of these questions.

For question 2, I changed the top-level _index file to html, so I could exclude it without excluding the other _index.md files. That wouldn't be ideal in some situations, but it works fine this time.

For question 3, I had Hugo generate a json file of all tags used on the site, then fetched it using a select. It works ok, but if a new tag is created, it doesn't show up in the select until the site is built, which could be a few minutes.

- name: tags
  label: Tags
  type: select
  options:
    creatable: true
    multiple: true
    fetch:
      url: https://mysite.com/tags.json