Hi Ray.
To answer your questions from my stand point, I find all three include choices to be very usefull.
The standard include is great for nuggets, footers, headers etc.... The "include from list" and "include from recordset" are essentially the same, but one is hard codes and the other is generated from the database. Although you could likely make one work from the other, it's nice to have them separated for quick development.
I think I prefer your idea for the "title, description, etc...". The joy of includes is that all the logic is kept on a single page, then they separated that one area. If it could just inherit from the page that would be fine with me. If it were kept the same - I'm used to it, and that would be fine too.