HOTT as an 'underutilised' ruleset + individual basing

I've loved HOTT since I first played it as a teenager. When my Warhammer-playing friends and I first got hold of the rules, it was a real 'scales from eyes' moment. After a decades-long gap for the usual reasons, I've really enjoyed playing it with my kids (and their friends, and their friends' fathers ...). But it's often occurred to me that the ruleset is a little 'underutilised' - by which I mean it's not perhaps treated as flexibly as other rulesets but tends to be played rigidly as in the rulebook. But perhaps I'm wrong - and our adventures in various permutations are much more commonplace than I imagine.

Here are a few of the things we commonly do with the game:

• Giant games with a single command per side. We've played huge games using a single PIP die each, and have found it works well even with 96AP a side. The groups are bigger, and you often have a choice between 'fixing' disrupted battle lines and manoeuvring uncommitted elements, but the game's just as fun. We tend to break armies up into commands only when we have more than two players, but even then, we often go with 40+AP per command.
• 'Battles to the death'. We usually ditch the formal victory conditions and just play to surrender or complete defeat. This stops 'technical knockouts' - an aerial hero kills your general in the first melee of the game, etc. - but leads to lots of interesting last stands and occasional surprise comebacks. What we've found is that the command penalty for a dead general is disadvantage enough, and that the out-of-command situation can force a lot of interesting dilemmas. It's not that there's anything wrong with the standard victory conditions, but sometimes you just want the game to go on.
• Asymmetric games - not something new to DBA veterans, given the encouragement to recreate historical battles in the current rulebook, but not something that I've seen discussed much with HOTT. We've tried out some of the One Hour Wargames scenarios; the strict 2:3 ratios in some of those scenarios don't work terrible well, given the greater flanking opportunities with 36 elements to 24 compared with 6 units to 4, but a discrepancy of six elements or so seems about right.
• Games with individually based figures. I wrote a blog post about this here. We tried this because we wanted games with lots of hordes, and hordes take such effort to paint up relative to their AP cost. But not if you use individual figures! We used the 15mm movement with 28mm figures, which seemed about right on a 3' table, but next time we try it, we might use 28mm movement on a bigger table. There were only two minor problems with it. The first was aesthetic: single-model warbands and spears getting rear support looked a bit odd on their own (but not as part of a line), so I did consider only allowing rear support if the front rank consisted of more than one base. But as D3H2 solves the spear problem and we don't have any individually based pikemen, it might be OK as is. The other thing was the question of 'double-width' elements. Most beasts, knights, riders, etc., that we have are based on 25mm frontages, but we do have quite a few bigger monsters on 50mm bases. I put down a few thoughts about them here, but I wonder if I was wrong to use dragons as my starting point (I didn't want them to be too prone to flight).     
• Individual bases and gigantic commands. We found this worked really well, as you had the PIP-based risk/reward thing of splitting groups and the primacy of line over 'units'.