For me, InDesign is the best writing tool. Great keyboard shortcut editor, the way styles work is much better than any other program I’ve used (though WordPerfect’s character styles were better), versatility with foreign characters, easy to script (which helps even when writing texts).

I’ve no idea. Best to ask them.

Your example didn’t come through, but I’m guessing it’s something like this:

whiskey
[Tab]Highland
[Tab]Islands
[Tab]Lowland

I suppose that the script you’ve tried is index-direct.jsx. It indeed doesn’t deal with subtopics in any way. You could try Marc Autret’s https://www.indiscripts.com/category/projects/IndexMatic, which does.

Difficult to say without seeing your file. Could you send it to me (pkahrel@gmail.com) so that I can investigate?

This (old) problem came up again in another forum and I received emails about it, so time to come up with a workaround. It’s a bit convoluted, but it works fine:

https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/text-variables-in-running-headers.html