Vectorworks will flatten your top view of section view into a 2D vector. It’s a function of the program. AutoCAD also has a flatten function that will compress any view into a flattened, simplified view if the object was built in AutoCAD. It unfortunately doesn’t seem to work on imported Sketchup models.
I see what you mean about using the tags to create 2D views of objects and embed them into the component - that may help quite a bit. It does mean doing double work on an object, but components like furniture, chairs, tables will only need to be done once and that might help considerably. We use a lot of pipe and drape also, so having a 2D object embedded in the 3D component on it’s own tag should go a long way.