Multiple contacts in multiple categories with multiple custom form fields

This is a complicated question, so I'll start by describing what I need to accomplish.

We are soliciting nominations for 14 different awards. Most awards forms have similar form fields, such as who is submitting, who is being submitted, reasons for submitting, etc.
Some awards need to have documents attached. Some need to have either check boxes, radio buttons or drop down lists selections, but not all of them do.

I'm creating a unique contact for each award.

Each contact (award nomination form) needs to have a unique subject line for our organizational purposes.

Award nomination forms don't need a 'message' field, as they have text area fields for this.

For our regular contact forms, we don't want any of the options used in the award nominations forms to show up, just the standard subject, message fields.

I've created separate categories for standard contacts and special contacts and put the award contacts in the special categories.
however, I'm not able to get contacts in the child categories to inherit the form fields assigned to the parent categories

It looks like the only way to do this is literally create a separate category for every award contact form, and then create a separate set of identical form fields for each one, meaning I'm looking at creating upwards of 100 identical form fields.

Is there a better way to do this? It seems to me that having to attach form fields to categories instead of individual contacts, and not having form fields inherited for child categories is the thing that is preventing this.

Thanks for your input.

Dear Eric,

Have you tried to enable the option "Cascade Form Fields" under the Contact Form tab in the component options?

Alternatively, what you could do is create one single form with "condition". See this documentation page .

If you'd like I can implement this for you as a custom job. If you are interested, please contact me using the Support » Contact Form ^{(which also uses Contact Enhanced)}.

Best wishes,