Thoughts on technique

I don't have a picture to show - yet - lace weight yarn is making things slow, but . . . .
So I'm working on Putnam's shawl. Cruising along, the edges are a modified rose leaf pattern and the bottom is a diamond pattern with beads at the center. So this morning, I decided it that was going to be a heck of a lot of diamonds - both for me to knit and for anyone else to wear. It needed to be broken up, so I'm in the process of putting a window into the center of it. The frame is the rose leaf pattern again, don't know what I'll do in the middle of that. Maybe more diamonds, maybe something else. But it got me thinking about flexibility and technique. Traditional shawls start with a center rectangle or square and once that's done you pick up around the edges and work an edging or series of them until the shawl is the desired size. There's a really interesting post about different techniques here. Now, these techniques have never appealed to me, but why?
I love picking up sleeve and other edgings and knitting down because the joins look so nice and smooth. I'm not afraid of ratios. or even of mitres and corners. I guess I get freaked out by the sheer number of stitches. 500 plus and that's a HUGE investment before I can see if I like it, and I tend to work on the fly. So now, I'm realizing that I've made up my own, simpler way of having this kind of flexibility by seeing how it looks and dumping in more sort of faux Shetland panels into the middle.
Basically, I seem to be a never ending well of ways to cheat.
I'll post a picture of my big fake once I have more done and it photographs well.