Alright, I'll try my best, though trust me that the people under the rain are thoroughly aware of the many differing methods we all start out with before we find our own, unexpected ways to approach animation inside of TVPaint.
Your approach is typical of those of us who come to TVP from the classical 2D method, and only for us TVP finally introduced the X-sheet, which involved weeks of cumbersome reprogramming based on high demands of users (including myself). Then it turned out that hardly anyone uses an X-sheet because it is a method anathema to the digital world. By the time TVP's X sheet came out I actually was way into falling in love with timeline work and I never even gave a look at the X-sheet.
The X-sheet principal is to take the animator's numbered sheets and organize them into sequences for the camera operator to follow when shooting on film the first pencil test. There are always mistakes to discover so the animator gets back to reworking the x-sheet.
In the timeline you can rearrange your individual drawings on the fly and once you spot a mistake, you can drag frames or entire sequences to wherever you want and get instant feedback -- why bother with an X -sheet since the X-sheet was primarily designed to help the animator communicate his ideas to the cameraman (the X stands for camera exposure, by the way
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I don't feel like going back to read your own work process, but I presume you are still drawing on paper and scanning your drawings to fill up the X-sheet with. If you draw directly into the Project Panel an X-sheet will soon make no sense whatsoever... and believe me, you will draw digitally soon, if you aren't doing so already.
Then the developers started to answer the demands of professional storyboard artists and the long process of developing this new Tab began. As an animator who has never used animation assistants and for the past 15 years works 90% of the time on my own productions, I had no need for storyboarding. Storyboarding is for team work so I wasn't interested in this new development and paid little interest to it. But at one point I began to notice what can be done with this digital way of boarding. Once I understood how Projects can be split into clips I got myself into a new workflow. I realized the advantage of developing an entire sequence of scenes (now I go along with the flow and call scenes clips, which make up a scene) and work like this:
I use the Thumbnail view of the Project Tab and indeed, draw something like a storyboard to give me the layout of clips that represent a future scene (or 2 or 3 scenes, but never more). I export these stills to my editing program Sony Vegas, where I have already laid down a skeleton of a sound track. I never animate without a sound track. I stretch the clips to fit into the soundtrack and play like a slide show. This tells me right away where I need to make changes to tell the story better. I make copies of the sound track that covers each still image and import those into my TVP clips (remember, what was a storyboard panel is also a clip when you switch from Project Tab to Clip Tab. That's where I load the individual sound clips and start working on an animatic, which comes easy now that I can time my drawings to sound. I do this with all my clips and often export the animatics to replace my stills in Vegas -- well, not really replace because my still is now made of several stills, all under the same file name, so when I go to Vegas I see an animatic instead of a slide show without ever changing a thing in Vegas.
Then comes some real animation and here I depart in a major way from the classical 2D workflow (the X-sheet by now is in the dust bin of my memory). I animate in all clips at the same time, by which I mean, I might choose to start animation that ends clip #1 and then move to clip #2 to start with the animation that opens clip 2. I compare this way of working to the way a landscape painter will work a canvas. Not starting in one corner and painting his way across the entire canvas until it's all covered with paint -- but place a few colors here and there to workout the color composition to start with.
I "paint" out my color composition of several scenes (2 or 3 as I have mentioned which amounts to maybe a dozen or fewer clips)
You'd go nuts working this way in the analog world. The advantages are that you can better develop your character as you sketch and move him about an entire sequence of actions. You get to know him well as you adjust his lines back and forth between clips. By the time it comes to full, hardcore animation you can feel secure about who he is.
I draw basically in two's which means that most of the time I keep my project set to 12fps and expand to 24 when I render out my AVIs to Vegas. There are times when you need to animate in singles, but you should know about those by now.
Since I do all the drawings and my films tend to be long (Sandra and I are finishing up a 2 hr film in 4 parts right now and while she is catching up with all the painting of the clips I have already finished, I have started on a new 30 minute film. But, as I said, since I have to do all the drawing and Sandra all the coloring, I have my own way of taking shortcuts, though I never cheat on inbetweening. I create some very demanding sequences (animation wise), followed by still shots. Or followed by long pans following some small thing in the distance. It is important to make these decisions to fit the storyline -- the use of stills have to be justifiable, not self-serving.
And that's about my whole workflow in the raw... anyone, feel free to ask anything that needs clarification for you.
(And anyone please feel free to answer questions asked of me or join in with what you do differently.)
