Finder color tags don't work

Apart from the fact that Apple effectively killed the usefulness of color tags to me after 10.6.8 when they brought in the stupid dots that you have to take off individually of every individual colour dot (much more mouse clicking, like Microsoft!) whereas before we could just hit the 'no color' tag (it was a small cross in a white circle) and clear the color tag...

And the colour lines used to go right across the finder list and were way more useful than the dots because you could see where you were even with finder columns skinny. You could superfast run your eye across and see file name, date, file type, size, etc, all in one glance without having to strain to keep on the row... I used the colors like 16 hours a day!

Now on Sierra the ****** dots don't even work. Just the simple act of trying to take off a color dot from a file created on the iMac, sitting on the desktop, never been on someone's server, never been on an external drive..... No go. Drives me nuts!

Any brilliant ideas, anyone?