Glad you did.
As to scaling things up, I think it takes a bit of practice to know when you'll run into the small face issue. Basically, SU won't fill faces with very short edges so the work around is to scale up prior to doing anything that would result in those short edges. The operations that typically cause the creation of those short edges are Follow Me and Intersect.
My approach to dealing with this sort of thing is to make a component of the involved geometry before doing whatever it is that will cause the problem. Then I make a copy of the component, scale that copy up (without opening it for editing) and then edit the large copy of the component as needed. when I'm finished with the editing work, I close the large component and then delete it. This eliminates the need to scale back down and potentially have to move the component back into place. Of course you can scale the entire model if desired, too. My preferred method does require components instead of groups though.
I'll add that it is rare that I ever find a need to explode a component or group after I've made it. I nearly always just modify what I've already drawn.
