Coming from other languages I would have expected dot notation to work and not to have to range over the data to get one value from a series of keymap pairs. As it scales optimization is important so a more efficient way would be helpful.
But more confusing to me is that using isset isn’t working.
These issues make me feel like I’m missing a piece of the puzzle in comparison to what I’m used to when dealing with maps. Any help/ readings/ notes would be much appreciated.
Include a link to the source code repository of your project, because we really need the context of seeing your templates and partials to be able to help you. It is trivial to do a quick git clone on your repo, then run hugo server in your project, to help you out. On the other hand, recreating your code from screenshots, or sort of guessing at it, is not.
If you can’t share your repository for whatever reason, consider creating a dummy repo that you can share, which reproduces the problem you’re experiencing.
It is going into production so I will not be sharing it and recreating a demo is a bit much; however, I realized it is due to the post options being a list which each item in the list is a map.