I should state, I do like the idea of abstracting away mongoose from form. But I think that particular change needs to be thought through in context for a larger refactoring for this part of the codebase.

This part of the code base allows you to associate one record with another. At present, it just dumps the results in a select list. This is pretty bad in the greater scheme of things, when you start talking about referencing related collections with hundreds of documents.

A more suitable 'search and link' interface needs to be used.