One of the things you can easily do with your approach is to offer "soft shorting". Essentially, one of the biggest issues with normal short positions is that downside is basically unlimited. Plenty of shorts have been wiped out in this very, very long bull market. Soft shorting, imo, is just discluding a particular stock from your index. No insane downside, less active, but still a bet against a company.

I want the option for an index of SP500, minus exposure to $TICKER. You approach could very easily facilitate that with how you will buy.

This can be an "active" component of an otherwise heavy bet on indexing.