Disable generation of sub-section list pages

Greetings! I am attempting to create custom home/index pages for my top-level sections. I have attempted to create a _index.md in my content with the markup, but it is ignored. When I update the template to define a section page (e.g. layouts/test/test.html), then I end up with a list page for each sub-section (e.g. ./test/subsection1.html for ./test/subsection1/_index.html). I don’t want to use disableKinds on each sub-section page for fear that my menus will be incorrectly rendered (and it is ignored regardless). I am using version 0.34 of hugo. Any thoughts?

Thanks!

As a follow-up, I’ve resorted to running hugo multiple times for each top-level section as each section has a specific theming requirements as well as requiring a specific home page. This is working for us as we are incorporating the site generation as part of our build process.

It is hard to understand what you try to do without seeing the actual source.