When I was first starting out with top-down parametric designs I found myself using many innate SolidWorks functions that seemed very well suited to designing in the assembly level to control part features only to find that those features were causing the odd behaviors that I now know were circular rebuild errors. I avoid these features like the plague and when I am forced to use one, it always resides at the bottom of my feature tree. I am interested to know from the community what SW features/functions you avoid and why, and then how you work around these limitations if you do get them to work.

Examples of features that I am personally thinking of are any Assembly Features "propagated into parts", sketch patterns, Assembly Layout Sketches, etc. An example of one that I work around is the ubiquitous Extrude/Boss that consumes a sketch and pulls it down from its rightful place at the top of the feature tree, so I use a Derived Sketch for the features that consume sketches to keep those shared sketches where they belong.

Looking for your input guys ...