I thought about floating it, but I think I'd get the same smoothing issue on the floated piece anyway. Or not. I'll try that too. I'm not sure if I did this right or not...
Why not just float the whole thing? Clone the faces you want to extrude from into a seperate object and extrude from *that*, topology issues shouldn't be a factor? You could even float a third 'trim' element over it to smooth the transition. Assuming this is for normal mapping, of course.
Cool! I tried it with a denser cage, and that made it a whole lot easier. Between that, the quad-cornered loops, and floating a lot of stuff, it's making a lot more sense to me. Thanks guys!:thumbup: