Hi @stephtara
I moved your question to a new topic, because the answer will be useful to others and then we can keep the related UX topic scoped to the implementation details.
Tags are definitely an area that could be with some polish, so I encourage you to add your vote to the relevant feature request. The more votes, the more chance it will be prioritised.
In the meantime, adding tags up front is something that can be done, but it’s quite hidden and unintuitive.
You can go to the tag page, here that would be https://meta.discourse.org/tags
And then click here:
To upload a .csv file to add them in bulk
Have you seen this dropdown on the categories view:
Discourse is really great, once it’s all setup!
I hope you’ll hang in there and we’ll do our best to help 