A new teqnique that I've fallen into lately is to leave my 'chaotic' associative model intact, but extract and unparameterize the resulting body before linking it into other parts. In that way, if the chaos unravels my model will stay intact, yet I can still edit the original features and re-extract a new body if changes are required. In the right circumstances, this can be a life saver.
Better still link from the parametric model to begin with then just break the link. At this stage you may wish to annotate say and attribute with the name of the parent file for future reference. The result is that you don't carry baggage and it is even simpler to edit the parameters of the body with the broken link and re-link it to an updated version of your original.
