At the end of the day the workflow that works best for you is the one you should use. I can only be advocate for what works for me obviously, and that might not be what works for someone else. My main point was to address what seemed to be an impression I was getting that somehow not doing everything "all in the render" was somehow cheating. Perhaps I totally misgauged that, it's just something I run across a lot and it's one of my little pet peeves. Apologies to anyone if it sounded like I was dictating.