I get the points about validation and the goal of making forms more user friendly by presenting the same form with errors clearly marked. It seems helpful for code re-use to use some kind of self-submit page.
Since it is obvious that I don't know how to effectively use ad_form or the underlying form builder in every situation, I would like to start some kind of database of examples for myself. I'm not interested in the default behavior of either of these two APIs, since that seems documented already. What I want to figure out is how do more tricky situations. If anyone has examples they would like to share, please email them to me.