I think that my choice of method, placing strips of faces along the outline and attempting to merge them, kind of incorporated several steps in one. At least the way I did it. I don’t know if I did myself a favor or not. But in either case it seems to work for me. Of course that means that the previous step and this kind of is the same to my approach. The downside is that it took some time…
…oh, and in all fairness, I did try some edge slides and knife steps before, while trying to learn ‘by youtube’.
Still, I got stuck because I had gaps in my knowledge…
… so, again, thanks Michael for filling in the blanks 