If I understand correctly, sounds like you are trying to do more or less what I was trying to do when I asked this question:
As @moorereason suggested, I ended up going with taxonomies as Hugo only generates a list view for the top level section (‘product’ in your case).
Interesting aside: as my site navigation depends only on the taxonomies now, I decided to use the ‘redundant’ product list view to implement search functionality with the excellent isotope.js used to filter the list of all products by whatever the user types in the search box. Works pretty well and almost instant results for my use case (500 products)!