Thanks for the response Raymond - I ended up creating a template field fed from a separate model that displays my current options as a picklist in a pop-up modal when a user clicks on the default text 'Select your record…". That modal also has a button for ‘Add a new record’ that launches a second modal with the required fields for the record (and a couple others we wanted). When you hit a custom save button, everything is updated in the model, and the modals close. The real magic was adding both the Template field and reference field - which is either populated by choosing an option from the picklist in the first modal or creating a new record in the second modal - into my form with render conditions to hide the reference field and display the template field until the reference field had a value. So now when a user selects or creates the necessary record, the fields swap in the background as the modals are closing and the user see the updated, correct input moving forward.
