Haha indeed I’ve been quite vocal about this issue (and others 
), also here there’s some extra context Enhancing Houdini integration and also in a bunch of different PRs. We encountered the same limitations you are seeing @StephenScollay months ago once we started using OP and instead of painfully redesigning the whole integration (which would certainly be possible but production time constraints make this very hard) we decided to work in a very vanilla Deadline/Houdini way and only use a very thin layer of OpenPype that I had already created to be able to do batch publishing (Batch publishing (ingest) - #9 by fabiaserra) so they can explictly publish what we produce through Deadline/Houdini as a post-process after the artist has validated it and artists were much happier with this approach.
In order to do that, we mostly make use of the Deadline ROP submitter (Houdini — Deadline 10.3.2.1 documentation) and we set a bunch of defaults on the vanilla node parameters through Houdini OnLoaded/OnCreated python script events (Python script locations) to reduce artist mistakes (i.e. enable split of extract/render on render nodes, default paths where cache/renders live, default to checkpoint, disable TX generation on Arnold…).
Then I created this custom HDA ROP called “OP Publisher” which basically wraps the functionality of this module I created that allows us to publish anything in the farm OpenPype/openpype/modules/deadline/lib/publish.py at release/alkemyx-next-minor · fabiaserra/OpenPype · GitHub where they are able to select the destination Asset, Task, Name of Subset, Family (render, point_cache, camera…), add a comment and set the different paths of the representations of the subset.
The HDA has some simple code like this to facilitate the parameters to be filled automatically on connection with other ROP nodes so they don’t need to type anything in most of the cases:
In the future I’d rather make AYON collect Houdini vanilla nodes as publish instances so I can reuse some of the validators and other features but as I said, it’s hard to find the time to do those things, specially when you already have a working system artists can work with…