Thanks again, Martin.
I really respect the expertise that you and the other mentors bring to the rest of us to help solve problems. There’s no amount of book learning that can substitute for experience!
I had a play with the Merge options and after a few tries I figured out what it was doing. It was a challenge to pick the correct vertices in the correct order, but eventually I got it to work. It didn’t seem any easier than the delete-slide method, but it eventually gave good if not better results. I can see that if I had started with Merge in mind, it might indeed have been easier. And it’s nice to have different options for workflow.
I like the idea of making things “less offensive” and keeping the question of “Does it look good?” at the forefront. At my skill and experience level, that’s the best I can do.