i was trying to find a workaround for the fact that you can't change the display of a particular tab. and in setting the tab's indicies to object, i could add the disabled property. what i was expecting was the viewPath property to populate the tab contents, not the tab itself. and, oddly enough, the errors that display, expecting strings, doesn't hamper the functioning of the tab-as-object. 
so, thank you for helping me clear up the functional differences there. 