LTCClark, Good ideas.
In the meantime, you can try a few of these hints to make your mission experience a little more like the 'good old days'.
As you are probably painfully aware, any mission posted will delete itself 2 minutes after the start time. To get around this, within the first two minutes of launch, edit the mission and change the launch time to somewhere in the future. Remember, you can build, edit, delete, and join missions while in flight, so even if your current mission gets 'smurfed', go ahead and use the mission editor to build a new one.
Also, you are allowed to post multilple missions, so you can, in fact, specify a mission with waypoints and such for.. say a flank attack vs. a straight on diversionary raid, with pilots joining the mission fitting their assignment. The drawback here, of course, is that the mission text channel would only apply to those in your specific mission.
Good luck!