Maybe you think I’m coming at it backwards, but I am just a user reporting my experience.
I had skimmed the page about collections that you shared previously. It confirmed what I had done to get things working my way which felt very much like a hacky approach. That’s why I was interested in your solution which sounded much more straightforward.
Personally, I think Collections should have a sub-setting to control where they are applied. It would be very obvious to users: create collection, choose where it is applied. Done.
I think it is not user friendly to have to do two separate actions in different locations to create the desired effect. My proposed arrangement would allow for turning on and off some collections periodically and by device. Perhaps you could even add date or time ranges to each so that they turn on and off automatically. But with these settings within the collections UI, it could be (if designed well) very easy to understand.
I don’t think the feature is so complex that it should require reading of help docs. Conceptually it is a very simple idea, it’s just been implemented in a complex way.
I’m saying that as someone who is far from a clueless, IT illiterate user. I think most other people I know would have never figured this out at all.
I get that you guys are a small team but UI / UX is really important, especially if you want to make the product accessible to more people. I’m assuming that you do want to do that right?