I was hoping others had seen the same behavior, in part, because I would like to figure a way to cheat it into working that way all the time.

I love when I can use the assist for all the heavy work, and save the gas for just the light load of cruising. And I was getting good drivability for those miles that it was "low fuel". The only time I worry about saving the assist is when I have to climb the hill at Stony Brook Park, south of Letchworth on NY Rt. 36 southbound. Coming back, that hill can recharge the batteries from about 40% discharged (60% capacity) to full with regen cutting out just before the bottom of the hill.

Assist doesn't come free. For every mile you drive with assist you probably have to drive two miles with regen. It's not very efficient in general. The only good time to use assist is when you put more demand for power on the ICE than it can generate efficiently. Otherwise you're actually hurting overall FE as well as hurting the battery pack by over-using it.

2006 HCH Alabaster Silver w/Navi
2003 Honda Accord LX

This depends. For me, when driving on the freeway, I'm in a place with a lot of hills. Going up, I usually peg the throttle just shy of where assist kicks in, and let the car lose a bit of speed. However, if I am nearing my usual offramp (after a long decline), I will climb using assist, and hold my speed on the hills at no extra fuel cost then coast/regenerate for a bit longer and end up with a full pack at the end of the offramp.

If you know there is an opportunity to capture regenerative braking, it's better to be "assist-happy" as you will replenish that using braking energy, rather than trickle-charging from the engine. Likewise, if you know you will be climbing for a while, it would be better to lower the threshold for calling assist, or lower the amount of assist given at a time to 'stretch' the pack out. This is where having some sort of manual control--such as a switch between different assist algorithms built into the car--would have been a very handy feature for Honda to implement (similar to how many modern automatic transmissions have different shift algorithms the driver can choose).

As far as I know, the pack only gets "assist happy" when it nearly full. At that level, using the pack creates infinitesimal wear and tear. It is only if you start to deep-cycle that battery lifespans begin to degrade. There is a hard coded limit to this, restricting the available power to about a 50% window of the actual pack capacity, and I believe that only if you regularly cycle below 50% of the allowed SoC of that will it cut down on the pack's intended lifespan (that is why the pack gets "charge happy" at that point--when going up the hill to my house, once I get to halfway empty, assist goes away unless I need to accelerate/pass)