Taxonomy term page using custom template?

And right away we have a problem, as adding this to the templates and loading example.com/blog/categories gives “section - blog”, while loading example.com/blog/categories/cat gives “page - blog”

Also, in my config, I have category = 'blog/categories/:slug/, as per my solution to this other problem I had. Changing “category” to “categories” does make it work, but at the same time the term pages fail to pull metadata from the _index.html files I have set up for them (these simply specify the header text and the aside text).