Thank you for the feedback. A few follow up questions:
1. could having all these extra links be slowing website performance?
2. would having the extra links be essentially hurting our indexing since google would be wasting time crawling so many urls for a page when only one is needed?
3. This is also a concern: (per Google) "This indicates the preferred URL to use to access the green dress post, so that the search results will be more likely to show users that URL structure. (Note: We attempt to respect this, but cannot guarantee this in all cases.)" If there is no guarantee one of the URLs we don't like will come up in a search, this could deter our clients. If we make a typo, for example, click update, then go back and fix it, the typo URL still exists and Google can index it, even if its attached to a canonical. How do we go into our root folders and simply remove all URLs we no longer want?

Thank you!