Hi!
Thank you for tall the details, it helps me a lot.
The priorities do work, but the problem is the grouping. The grouping is done once after all of the results are parsed, and then placed into the individual groups as configured. On your configuration you have product category groups. Any matching result is grouped exactly as defined, so if the ‘hose reels’ category is lower on the list, it is placed there.
The only ways of resolving this is either turning off results grouping, or by me adding some sort of a new feature that would allow ordering the groups by overall results priority/relevance of some sort, but I am not sure if that is doable. Nevertheless I will note this as a feature request, and see what I can do about it in the upcoming release.
Thank you for noting about the pop-up, it should be fixed now.