This is what I do and it works really great and it doesn’t keep you from using Colors in any other way. It doesn’t actually use the color itself, but rather the name of the color. So you can have 5 colors in your pallet that are all the exact same shade of orange but with different names. At the heart of it you are using the Color Name as a constant which you can assign to a Track. I wrote in some detail about this here.
Still the vertical markers idea would be pretty useful.