I can indeed start by selecting a tag in the sidebar under “Tags”, and then drill down further using the filter.
But my point is that the tags listed in the filter are all mixed. For example, let’s say I selected a “To read / watch” tag, which is a “Status” tag, in the tag hierarchy.
Since I wouldn’t have any item tagged multiple “Status” tags, as that wouldn’t make sense, the Tags Filter discards “Read / watched”.
But it still shows all the “Type” tags and “Topic” tags mixed together (and the selected “Status” tag is also shown) like this:
- Animals <---- Topic tag
- Article <---- Type tag
- Blog post <---- Type tag
- Development <---- Topic tag
- …
- To read / watch <---- Status tag
- United Kingdom <---- Topic tag
As you can see, this makes it mentally difficult to distinguish tags and drill down.
The best I could do to avoid this was, as I described in the post, to rename the child tags of “Type” and “Status” so they are listed at the top of the Tags Filter pane.
This is with a setup where I only have 3 categories of tags, in which the various areas of interest are considered “Topic” tags and therefore are all siblings.
But I could be interested in having brands as child tags of a “Brand” tag and countries as child tags of a “Country” tag.
So even if I started by selecting a particular tag from the tag hierarchy, as you suggested - for example, a “Status” tag again - I would still be seeing a list of tags from various categories - Brands, Countries, Types (of content), Topics, etc - all mixed together in the Tags Filter pane.