Glad its working!
Yeah, I personally don’t use them so much. And if I do, its just to get a quick list of items in the sidebar that can be opened directly without needing to open a view first. Just reduces a click if you have only a list of 5ish items that need to be opened.
You can have context views without smart folders. Simple press << in the entity rich text, give it a title, and create an inline view. It’s the same context view as smart folders. If you want to mirror it, you can’t though. In that case you might be better off using the multi-relation views as opposed to context views. This persist across all entities in a database. (This comes with the down side that you need a relation in order to make the view, see related: Add a view of "Collection" entities within another entity that are not related, just for reference - #4 by B_Sp, How we handle a view with too many related entities - #4 by Mircea_Braescu)
Let me know if this makes sense.