What you describe is a requirement for organizing styles into “families”. There is already this kind of structuring in the built-in styles. To see the hierarchy, select Hierarchical from the drop-down menu at bottom of the style sidepane.
You can see the 3 main “families” with ancestor styles Heading, Index and Text Body. Changing font face in one of them will have effect on all headings (Heading n paragraphs), TOC and indexes (styles Contents n, Index n and the like) and document content.
Built-in styles are fine for usual documents.
In your case, you want the “factory” hierarchy for your main content and a distinctive similar hierarchy for your appendix.
This means you must duplicate the main hierarchy. There are two ways to do that.
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“leaf duplication”
You create a derived style (with right-click+New) for every needed style in the built-in hierarchy.
This is convenient if your alternate choice for font face is not supposed to change while the other attributes (spacing, indents, alignment, …) are subject to review and edits.
A change of “geometry” in the main content is immediately echoed in the appendix but a font face change is not.
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“root duplication”
You create a derived style close to the root of the built-in hierarchy: Text Body, Heading or even Default Paragraph Style. Below this “appendix root”, you must manually create an alternate hierarchy matching the main content one.
There is probably more work than in the first procedure because you must configure all the new styles in their spacing, indents, alignment, …
Here, a change of indent in the main hierarchy is not forwarded to the appendix hierarchy but a change of font face in the appendix root is forwarded to all appendix styles.
There is no way to mix both approaches (which would solve your concern) because styles inherit from a single ancestor. There is nothing like multiple inheritance.
However, when you write you have 500 styles, I question your styling. There is certainly a lack of reasoning and thinking about your document. In Writer, a style does not describe typographical attributes like font face, size, weight, spacing, indent, colour, … A style, instead, tells the semantic value of the paragraph of word: Text Body for bulk discourse (no specific semantic value), Emphasis when a word is important, Strong Emphasis when it is very important. A paragraph may be styled Comment (to be created) when it clarifies the discourse, Quotation to highlight some point, Footnote well this one is obvious.
From an author point of view, you need roughly 10-20 paragraph styles to make a distinction between your paragraphs. Heading n for outline headings are included in this count. Add ~20 character styles to bring nuances to your discourse.
The semantic “grades” are the same in main content and appendix IMHO.
Once you have defined your semantic markup, you give the various styles their typographical attributes. Some “grades” may look the same (e.g. in my case Emphasis and Foreign Text both are rendered italics) but it is important for you, the author, to maintain a different markup because they have not the same significance value.
An author is never confronted to 500 different significances (or else he is unable to structure his thoughts). You should reconsider tour styling under the principle I briefly described.
If you want to clearly identify your appendix as not being part of the main content, I’d suggest the use of a different page style: a different header/footer or page number formatted differently (italics vs. Roman or adding a prefix to it), keeping other attributes unchanged (same margins). You then keep the same paragraph and character styles as in the main content (because these styles carry the semantic markup).
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