Thanks all.
Vodkafan, yes, a down to the wire game makes all of the difference. Re the hexes, I was playing solo, so I only had an audience of 1 to please :-)
I am pulled both ways with the hexes. As a boardgamer, I am quite happy with them as a mechanism, and while I enjoy their very obvious convenience, on this occasion, I enjoyed the aesthetic of the open table.
I had actually set the hex game up first, but by the time I added the road, water and hill, which generated some raised surfaces with the more obvious hex lines that it caused, I took it straight down and put out the terrain cloth, so it was just a snap choice based on visuals.
having done that, I took the opportunity to run through my conversion notes for taking my hexed rules to a non-hexed surface, so it was a useful exercise anyway.
The 12mm does work very well. One of the things I find odd is that, even as someone who enjoys photography and has a decent camera - the resulting photo shots do not do justice to what the eye sees. The 12mm looked very good, but somehow they lose presence to the lens of the camera, perhaps that is why our media is 28mm focussed.
I am told that the eye sees images at the equivalence of a 50mm lens, so perhaps there is something in that.