Heh, don't worry, I know how you feel... but I'm actually a bit excited about the Seawolves thing now
I think you're giving yourself a bit too much headache over the escort skill settings, since these are really very abstract values that you can't find any real historical data on - just rough approximations. Unless someone does a huge study on SHIII escort effectiveness and compares them to the real historical stats, we'll never know exactly how the skills should be distributed.
The bottom line is that you're pretty much on the right track with the elites, and the rest is not as huge as you might thing. Two competent-newbie escorts are more dangerous than a single veteran, anyway - so the numbers theoretically matter more.