Always a great source of debate ‘What’s the best way to use tags?’ - There isn’t one, there’s just different ways!
Personally I’ve avoided the rabbit hole of curating, managing & generally faffing with tags as 100% of my Stash is on StashDB I’m relying on the community to do the heavy lifting for me 
I’m always intrigued by those that like to deep dive into personalising their tags & curate in minute detail.
It’ll be great to see some tips, tricks & strategies that people are applying to their own Stashes …
so trouble is most of the tags on stashdb are all just scraped from the sites they come from which is mostly fine especially after some heavy lifting from @AdultSun but we do get these edge cases where the tag one site uses might not line up with the way another site uses it and becomes a whole mess
usually it comes down to two things, curated tags or scraped tags. Either you manually tag all your stuff yourself or you just let the scrapes handle it and just try and deal with any weird collisions/aliases
there is a secret third option for local stash’s where you can do both and have your own personal tags just for curation say something like My Tag: TagName but that does not lend itself to nicely submitting to a stash-box
Are you using the ‘secret third option’ or mostly using the 'Adultsun Approved’™ approach?
I’m just generally intrigued on levels of micro management people apply. I use tags solely for what’s included in the content but there’s people potentially using them in the opposite direction (No Anal for example) & all sorts of things.
The third option is just to be able to use both and an easy way to differentiate the tags you added vs the tags that might have been added via stashdb or a scrape if you wanted to curate all your tags you can technically do both you just need to qualify the tags for easy searching and identification
I personally do something like this with Tags that interest me, but the majority of my tags are from scrapes, I try to keep all the tags unique to their scrape source and then merge them into an appropriate tag as an alias, its a bunch more work but helps with the conflict
Say for example one studio uses Blonde to refer to Male and Female performers and others just for Female. I would have two tags in stash and each studio would map to the correct one because the scrape would come back like studio_a:Blonde or studio_b:Blonde which I have aliases for in the tags in stash
as for just organizing in stash I use the prefix method that AS uses where all the top level tags that I merge aliases into have prefixes for categories or just sorting that are manipulated by a userscript to change the color of the tag and remove the prefix
This is making for some interesting reading so I’ll throw in my 2c (perhaps as devil’s advocate) as someone who follows stashdb for integration and adhering to a source of truth to sync to
I have every stash tag Category under a c: prefix with my own sub-categories that I keep locally for organization and structure. I have 110 of these tags and ~20 tags for meta-management, everytthing else follows or is synced to stashdb at my earliest convenience
eg:
c:Accessories
c:Accessories: External Stimulation
c:Accessories: Furniture
c:Accessories: Insertion
c:Accessories: Pain
c:Accessories: Penis
c:Accessories: Restraint
c:Accessories: Texture