Hi @Aaren
Thank you for sharing this! It sounds similar to this post:
On a board we use internally, where we don’t want to trigger a notification to the team members yet but we do want to plan our resources for each iteration, we use the dropdown column to assign the tasks to different people in the team. It removes the human error associated with the text column and allows for filtering on the board.
Might that work for you as a workaround? 