Hi Will, well there are usually several different ways that you can go about doing any particular model.

Of course anything that gets the job done will be good, but some ways will be a lot fewer steps.

Over time you'll get more used to associating certain tools for certain shapes, like when you see something that has an even thickness it is generally good to think of Shell.

There are a few operations that bundle up a bunch of operations within them. Like for instance Shell in this case combines offsets with lofting between a bunch of edges. Similarly booleans bundle up intersecting and trimming surfaces and automatically discarding different pieces and then joining. All of the "low-level" tools are available to you, but if you steer things towards using the functions that bundle up many of them for you, you can get them to do a bunch of work for you and save some time.

It sounds like (with projecting etc... ) you are getting more comfortable with working with curves and applying them during the modeling process. This is really good, because that generally tends to be the way to start things moving.

- Michael