That was very helpful, Michael.

I found two things: 1) The Merge function will cause one curve to be created from many broken adjacent segments - only if they are NOT separated or intersected by the junction of another curve.
2) The Rebuild function does a nice job, but the result does not naturally match the associated edge it resides along side with. I could inset the rebuild curve and Loft the original to the rebuild, but you'd see the un-smooth result.

In the pic below, I went nuts with Blend. Made holes from projections and even learned that projections can be moved and tweaked by moving their parent object!!! Wow!
I ran into a problem where my to-blend edge had intersected curves... hmmm. I had to Trim in new points to blend the edges in bite-sized sections. But they sometimes don't run tangent to each other.
It's better than nothing, and I'm pretty excited about learning how to do more complex modeling. :-)