I am waiting on some results of mine to come in so I take this time to quickly skim the rather long post and throw something up.
- Folders: yes, Templater with some meta template hub can do similar things
- Tags: I remember fiddling with Metadatamenu in the past and the was some method to clone tags into fileclasses and then you could take it onwards, I guess.
But this latter memory (whether it can work or not) is rather vague.
See also:
Additionally, see the new release of Notebook Navigator plugin:
“New command: Create new note from template. If you have the plugin Templater installed you can now create a new note with template in the current folder or tag.”