Nice post and icons. I wish the APEX team had added the ability to return a different value than the one selected. i.e., Display and search by customer_name but return customer_id to the page item.
Indeed! I would also expect it to have that option. And the Help text actually is a bit misleading:
SQL Query -
Enter the SQL query definition to populate this list of values. Generally list of value queries are of the form:
select [displayValue],
[returnValue]
from ...
where ...
orderby ...
That's why my preferred solution is to use a Select List item, with select2 added on top of it. This way I have both a Display/Return and Autocomplete feature.