Honestly, I fully missed that box in the options, I actually switched which branch was the default using GitHub!
You sir, are a scholar and a saint! 
Thank you so much for this! JavaScript is way outside of my wheelhouse (as a data scientist by trade, I come from the world of Python and R mostly!) so I think I would never have come up with this.... Though you're right, learning some would be a good idea! Thanks again!
Also the docs for EJS seem a bit elusive, do you know where I can find them? (knowing what other stuff I can do like _.map and _.union would be super useful)