Well I managed a workaround and appear to have come up with a good solution.
I installed the custom sidebars plug in, then used a text widget to place my desired page content in for the topic page. I made that my default widget which means it automatically shows up on the topic page. To set the rest of my pages back to my standard widget, I used the custom sidebars plug in. It’s not a solution to solving the template issues with intricate themes, but a good workaround. Only took me three days to think of it 🙂