I have a similar setup to yours, with a set of orthogonal tag hierarchies including one for ‘Priority’. I find it manageable and useful by doing these two things:
- Make the ‘Priority’ tags first in the tag order (see below for nitty-gritty of this)
- On actions, always place any priority tag first in the list of tags.
As a result, the priority tag groups will be shown at the top of a perspective, and whenever actions are sorted by tag [edit: inside any kind of grouping, such as by date or by project] those with a priority tag will be at the top.
For example, simple tag groups will appear as:
- Today
- Week
- Home
- …
Combined tag groups will appear as:
- Today, Home
- Today, Office
- Week, Errands
- Week, Home
- …
Having these at the top is good enough for me to use a kind of ‘priority dashboard’, even if there’s lots more stuff displayed further down.
[Edit: If you group by due date in a perspective, then inside the ‘No Due Date’ group, the highest priority items will appear at the top.]
Condition (2) requires frequent rearranging of the tags on new actions to make the priority tag the first one, but has become a habit.
Condition (1) requires a one-time setup. Unfortunately, OF currently does not sort by tags according to the order in the tag hierarchy [edit: when you use ‘Sort actions by: Tag’ in a perspective]. Instead, it sorts according to the alphabetical order of the full path of tag name (eg. ‘Priority : Today’ or ‘Places : Errands : Supermarket’). You may need to add prefix characters to get the order you wish, eg:
_Priority
- 1 Today
- 2 Express
- 3 NextDay
- 4 Week
Places
- Office
- …
I emailed a request to OF Support to implement sorting according to how the user has arranged her tag hierarchy and I got a reply that suggested this may be considered.
