I consider myself an intermediate-advanced user of Word. Not quite up to writing macros, and not brilliant with Developer tools, but I'm pretty good with Styles, Hidden Formatting symbols, cross referencing, captions, etc...

However!

I've always struggled with Fields, and I really want to change this.

I am currently working on 50 similar reports. Some of the content is formulaic, and just needs a small, well defined tweak in each report. e.g. each report deals with a different location. I have been manually opening each report, and Find-Replacing the Location lines of text. However, with this example, the "location" information also happens to be the Title of the report, so I've figured out how to use the predefined Title field; now I only update the title page.

There are other types of info that aren't as simple as the Title. I want to be able to create a field for any purpose, an then have it repeat throughout the report, wherever I put a link to that field. BONUS: I'd love to then create a form that I can click to open, which asks me to fill in data for all the unique fields.

Putting the BONUS aside for a moment, I've already tried following one guide that used Developer Tools > Plain Text Content Control, and then copy-pasted that content control using Paste Special > Paste Link > Unformatted text... However, for some reason, that ONLY refreshed if I manually selected the links and Updated them, or Selected All and pressed F9. It wouldn't refresh if I hit print (and I did go into the options to make sure this setting was active); and then when I reopened a document, it seemed to struggle updating or loading the links -- generally just crashing... This seemed like a nightmare pathway for achieving my goal...

In closing, I'm hoping someone reading this gets what I'm after, and might either tell me:
(1) I was on the right path with the Developer tools, and just need to persist, because this sounds like an unusual problem
(2) I was on the right path with the Developer tools, but achieving what I want is usually problematic and troublesome, for anyone
(3) The Developer tools path was the wrong way about it entirely.

And if someone could comment on the BONUS goal, that'd be brilliant.

I have Kutools for Word (if any users have that and know it's possible to achieve my goals with it);
and I have Word 2016 and later (personal and work licenses).
Happy simply to be pointed to the best learning resources to achieve these goals.