Your solution is quite elegant for my specific issue.
I feel like I should leave it at this point. It works. It solves my issue.
But also: we all agree that there is no way to do a simple “while” loop/range in Hugo (or even go?), right? I am not trying to sow dissent, but it feels like this functionality would be useful in any logical scripting language. For, If, While, etc. I don’t have the proper technical education to list all the “default methods” a programming language (or templating language) should or might provide, but doing some form of “do something with every single item of this collection” should be part of it?
PS: Googling this results in many posts a la “For is Golangs While”… So it’s back to understanding the inner workings of while I guess 