Thanks Joe. I can definitely see what you mean by having multiple versions being a pain to administer. We do split editing permissions between my department and public works, with neither editing the others features, so maybe two versions would work there. The department head here has used reconcile the first way - push the parent version to the child.
Some of this may be the way ESRI sometimes confusingly names or describes things. I've seen the 'main' database described as parent, default, target, etc. 'Layer' means either a feature class, shapefile, etc. in the TOC except when it means a .lyr file. Reconcile in the first sense is also the correct answer to the certification sample question noted above. Oh well, thanks for the help.