6.1 overlay dropdown using 'optionPath' attribute

[taylorb26313642]

For a very big project, I am currently overlaying the page creation wizard with an added dropdown. I am trying to populate the dropdown with nodes stored under 'etc/designs/themes' in the jcr.  I can tell that the 'optionPath' attribute is working (because I have 5 nodes in that path and there are 5 options in the dropdown), but the texts/values are not coming through.  Do I need to have the nodes configured in a special way?  I already have text="" and value="" in each node .context.xml as well as a root .context.xml.  It seems like this is 95%, what am I missing??

[smacdonald2008]

Watch this GEMS session - it talks about modifying the Touch UI and may help in this use case: 

Extending AEM 6 Administrator User Interface

The GEMS session is in note in the article introduction. 

[taylorb26313642]

Only the "add or override a property" from page 8 or ~6:45 in the video touched on or near my question.

Once the overlay node is created in the jcr, is there any way to dynamically add the children (the items that would be populated in the dropdown) to it from identical locations throughout different code bases? Or just one code base?  I am trying not to have the dropdown options hardcoded within the xml, but instead be dynamically populated based on the 'optionPath'