Great post, and thank you for sharing this. The procedure for overriding default pages and creating custom pages was buried in our old Studio Guide PDF. Now that we've pulled our PDF guides speparate knowledge base articles in the Documentation area on Lithosphere, you'll be able to search for and fine steps like this much more easily.
You might find a few of the tips in these two articles helpful as well.
http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/pages-and-layouts/Override-a-default-page/ta-p/108961
http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/pages-and-layouts/Create-a-custom-page/ta-p/110639
Suzie