Dashboard Templates - where are they? Can they be modified? References in Layout window

The result of the naming / reference disconnect is that user changes to dashboard items (made through the provided tools, or via direct editing of the Layout JSON) donā€™t have the desired effect. Iā€™m guessing that, under the hood, there are Shade tables in the database, and there are Shades tables in the database, or something to that effect.

In the screenshots above, the auto-generated JSON references a Shades templateā€¦ but when adding a tile the only template option available is Shade. If we assume that the Shade template is the ā€˜realā€™ one, then its definition (and user-selected color-mapping to states, custom icons, etc.) are not applied to Layout tiles of template type Shades.

I hope that makes sense to you. Without any understanding of whatā€™s under the hood, I may not be explaining it very well. Note: As an experiment I tried to edit the references in the JSON to be ā€œShadeā€ - hoping that might resolve the problem - but such edits fail when I hit the save button. If you can explain the template ecosystem, I would appreciate it!