Thanks David,
I didn't realize you could have a numerical value behind the scenes and display a text value to the user. I think this option might work for us. I was doing some testing though and it looks like I'll have to create new fields, copy over all the existing data from our current status reports then delete the old fields. I was getting errors when I tried to convert the existing fields because it doesn't know to convert "Green" to "1" etc.
As for your question on why we use Issues with custom forms to report on Status. Prior to moving into Workfront we did paper status reports and just had a Word doc template. We have health metrics (green, yellow, red) on Overall, Resources, Scope, Timeline, and Budget. Our executives were interested in a dashboard that showed all of the projects and all of the health metrics in one place so we had someone every reporting period re-enter all the metrics from the various status reports into one excel sheet that we sent them. We wanted to eliminate that manual work when we went to Workfront. So now we have one "Project Dashboard" that all of the status reports roll up to (example screenshot attached). We keep the current status report (issue) open and close the prior ones and the report pulls in all the open issues where name contains "Status." We considered having a custom form at the project level as well where we update status every reporting period but we really wanted to have history in case someone wanted to go back and view older status reports, thus why we used the issue object.
Thanks Again!