Millions of Attributes or hacking a Sub sub sub Category?

I'm currently building a Zen-Cart store with 5893 products on sale, split into Categories, Sub Cats, and Sub Sub Cats. It's based on a 1.3.8a new install this morning, and i'm having a mini-crisis working out how to organise everything.

The biggest problem is, that each main Product has so many varieties. For example:

Category - Pots & Trays
Sub Category - Rigid Pots
Sub Sub Category - Tuku Pots and Tubs

Now below this level are a choice of 9 different types of this particular plant pot. For the example, i'll select the "Classic Series MTD (rigid)"

All seems easy up to now, as the "Classic Series MTD (rigid)" would be the product, and all is fine. Until you realise that there are 12 different types of "Classic Series MTD (rigid)" pots with different attributes such as Diameter, Height, Volume, Colour, Case Quantity, and each has its own price.

If I were to address all of these as attributes, there would be too many to manage. If it were a t-shirt company, it would be colour size, male/female and that would be it. But my attributes go from sizes of a plant pot to toe protection in wellington boots.

I considered setting the "Classic Series MTD (rigid)" up as a sub-sub-sub category using the category image and description and having all of these "attributes" as seperate products which could be added to cart from that page. But as far as I understand, you can't have different page layouts for cats, sub cats, sub sub cats, and sub sub sub cat. Is this correct?

I've found another site with the perfect solution, but this is done in ASP with another program. Doesn anyone know if this be done in Zen? - http://www.liquidpictures.co.uk/garden.jpg

Sorry to be so long-winded about this, but anyone with a superior brain to mine would be MUCH appreciated!

Thanks

Kristian

Out of the box, Zen Cart doesn't allow for different layouts for subcat levels; however, you can do just about anything if you have the programming skill. I don't know enough about the process to give guidance, but you should be able to clone the tpl_categories_default and other files and use logic to present the right one based on subcat criteria. I expect there are numerous ways it could be approached.