I guess to wrap up / expand on what I eventually decided, after all was said and done... is that I'm rollin' my own.
We have a couple engineers here that are not educated CAD guys at all that do their own drawings for most of their work. It works for them. One is doing tower crane foundations and occasional hotel slab foundations and the other one does 95% communication tower design.. the other 5% is communication tower SITE colocates and site developments. I set up the standard for all his site stuff and he just works with that. All their stuff (aside from the one dude's hotel foundations which I haven't seen the DWGs of, or care to) is very-very efficiently routine standard stuff. All they have to do is change a couple things... update an excel spreadsheet, change the title block, hit refresh on it all and print (aside from the calcs) So I was not going to meddle with that. The budget is real tight and they have something that works and to mess with that would cause a money loss. So we allow for those "anomolies" that even use the old title block still.
Now, that leaves the big boss, and an EIT the boss is working with, and -me-. We stick to the main standards I employ.. loosely. Layering is a bit chaotic. The big boss sticks with "S-Concrete" "S-Steel" "S-Rebar" "A-WallInt" "A-Windows" and so on. He adds a discipline prefix, but doesn't layer very specifically. "Steel" covers basically every beam, regardless of size, type, etc. So basically the whole design is on one layer, if we do a platform, lol... the EIT is somewhere between the boss and I. I tend to keep my layers more organized. "S-FNDTN-STEEL" "S-FNDTN-CONCRETE" "S-BLDG-W12COL" "S-BLDG-W8HDR" and so on. Some of our projects get big and the organization is nice. Generally though I'm the only one handling the CAD on the bigger ones, though, so there's never a problem.
That's the only thing that's loose. The title block, methods of xref'ing, color table, fonts, shape files, and practices about everything being "ByLayer" with very few exceptions, and not drawing on layer 0, and no one using 'explode' to modify blocks and all that... I'm strict on. The guys here are generally very understanding when I explain -why- I say it's a bad idea to do something. I never resort to "because that's how it's done" because, well, if I can't come up with a reason you SHOULDN'T DO IT... then maybe there IS no reason. I sometimes tell them "You know, I can't recall right now why not to do that, but let me get back to you... sometimes I am so habitual about something I forget why, and just 'do it' " and often times I recall why, later, and tell them.
I've also come to the realization that some things are just not practical to do in a firm so small with specialized roles that we have. Since I'm the only 100% CAD guy, I maintain a good standard that I can pass on to when another guy gets here, but I don't worry about the engineers unless I'm working on their project, and then they submit to my scheme, luckily.
I've come to the (mostly sad) realization that programming is not a viable solution for me for most things. The customization that would be TOTALLY KICK BUTT for me to have, just isn't worth it. If, in a firm of 500 CAD'ers, I can save each of them 1 hour per week, by investing 40 hours in a program, then obviously the ROI is astounding. If I burn 40 hours on a program, no matter how massive, the ROI on... -1-.. maybe 2... people... is just too long. The same goes with some time saving 'standards' we could have here. In a firm this small, structure needs to be loose, because the time spent organizing it will not come back soon enough.