I appreciate all the responses. And they've caused me to think a bit more on the topic, specifically as it refers to BiaB. Because of its rather unique approach, I've tended to favor the "plug in some chords, and then fit a melody" way of doing things.

More recently, I've moved beyond the simplistic, but I'm still working with harmonies mostly. What I tend to do now is I will develope a harmonic structure first, then bring it into BiaB, and I like to do this as a midi file. Reason why is sometimes BiaB doesn't like the chord spellings I come up with, but it will adapt if I import midi. This gives me the freedom to come up with some very sophisticated progressions, but usually the chords BiaB comes up with are at least close to what I had in mind.

Those of you who are melody driven, I can follow your lines of thought, but it seems to me it would be somewhat difficult to use BiaB from the get-go using a melody-driven approach since BiaB requires chords to be input in order to function. So, it sounds like you're doing some composition before using BiaB. Which I totally understand, especially since I'm doing much the same with my harmony-driven approach.

Best,
Michael

My Music:
https://soundcloud.com/michaelmcbroom/albums