None of this is news to me so I’m curious as to how you guys were doing it ‘wrong’.
I did a parts draft of a Prince of Persia set in 2010 at BrickFair, and this is pretty much how we did it. Part of it though is that there’s no set rules and the people involved can make decisions on the spot as they wish. For example we did not assemble the guys, so the heads were a lot, the capes were a lot, etc, but I remember discussing if we wanted to do that way and I think we voted on it. We also broke down lots that would be either super huge – that set comes with tons of tan 2×2 corner bricks, so we broke them into multiple lots – or very desirable – instead of one lot of nine camels, there were three lots of three camels. The idea was not for somebody in the group to feel like they ‘won’ by drawing a higher number in the order and then got the better lots but rather that everybody paid the same to participate (to buy their set) and everybody left feeling like they got their money’s worth back out, and then some cause they got the stuff they wanted and not the stuff they didn’t. I know I did.