Disclaimer: This is not the exact solution to your request, rather some thoughts (and tools) shared about your Opus tabs organization.
I did (kinda) what you did, having one lister with lots and lots of tabs (not as many as hundreds though 
).
In the end, the issue is the one you're raising: how to find the tab you want at a specific time?
So, I changed route, and did the following:
- Create listers that regroups folders/tabs that are really related to each other (meaning part of specific workflows)
- Make layouts out of those, so you can have listers dedicated to specific workflows
Now comes the part where you need to find the lister instead of the tab. It's a bit easier since there are less listers than tabs, but not easy enough.
So I made a script add-in that allows to search for an open lister based on its base layout:
- When found, brings it to front
- When not found, create/open it
ActivateOrCreateLister.opusscriptinstall (2.0 KB)
Finally, I had sometimes the need to open quickly just a bunch of tabs in my current lister without necessarily opening the full Layout associated lister.
There comes tab groups, and I made a FAYT script to allow to open (add) a tab group to the current lister, with the ability to close it when things are done.
You can find it here.
Note that, with the new ability to create dynamic buttons, I should release shortly a new version that uses buttons and menus (to replicate the TabGroups configuration structure that has folders to properly organize your groups) in addition to the FAYT feature.
I'm not saying this will better suit you, but for my personnal use, too many tabs in the same lister killed productivity. I spent too much time looking for the proper tab, not remembering if it was up/left or down/right, and so on. Having dedicated listers per type of tasks/activities really helped me being more organized.