It took me a while to get into mead... It really never had much appeal to me a few years ago, as I hated the taste of clover honey, and most of the meads I tried had been made of clover honey, or, have had an unbearably sweet taste or simply tasted over-honeyed.
My first attempts were on the behest of a friend, and was before much was figured out about adding nutrition to your musts. Needless to say, it sucked.. Hard.
Today... I'm still very limited in my range of honeys, but definitely have a better grasp of what to look for and what to use with what. (there is still a LOT of varieties that I have to experience and understand still).
Personally, I really have a love and affinity for blackberry and raspberry honeys which have a bit of acidity to them and a lot of rocking flavor.
I don't always use them though.
My favorite mead is berry melomels, however, recently started doing a braggot, and am also considering things more along the lines of metheglyns.
I find that I just like to experiment and try unusual things.
Braggots may be a pathway into beers for me (and I hate beer, but the braggot that I did was actually pretty damned good, and made me believe it's a "compromise" I can make with the dreaded beer...).
Metheglyns may be my way of applying what I know of general food preparation, herbs, and spices and apply it to unique drinks. It might even take me down the herbalist's path... (which is something I hadn't considered until now as I read Schramm's Compleat, and am gaining inspiration.... which tangentially, as I just finished the metheglyn section, he mentioned borage as a crazy herb that he was perplexed by... Imagining a metheglyn with fresh borage, and a fair amount of lemon peel, and using a more acidic honey? Something along the lines of a cucumber infused limoncello?)
And the braggots and metheglyns may in fact cross betwixt themselves and cause further inspiration as I am awaiting a honey order to arrive, and have taken it upon myself to try and do a sweet potato gruit but this time use sweet orange peel, rosemary, and dried juniper berries for my bittering agents. This was inspired by the braggot that was finished and the one that shall be improved upon soon, and oddly enough, was also in more of a gruit style. New herb combinations are being experimented with, which will be banked for knowledge when considering metheglyns in the future.
Thus far I have a bank of various future brews which I should start logging. In addition to those, I'm thinking of also fusing two ideas on the board here to create a new brew. (the coconut bochet and the sea salt mead might be a BEAUTIFUL meld to be honest...). I also am considering a request to make my ginger beer which I played around with this year into an alcoholic version... (As my eyes roll you can hear me mumbling "of course people request an alcoholic version...") I'm probably going to go to that clover honey I hate, and probably brew a show mead that I just said I dislike, and in the secondary, toss in MASSIVE amounts of ginger and lime peel and MOAR HONEY to bottle carb it.
So I don't know what kind of answer you were looking for, but I hope that has kind of given you an answer.
Oh yeah. I've never done JAOM or BOMM, and don't really intend to. I don't really do show meads either. The honey alone just doesn't bring forth the intense flavors that I enjoy in my brews. Granted, I don't want to just produce something that is another beast entirely and just uses honey as a sugar source. Otherwise, why bother with mead?
But I do like when the honey is a equal partner to other flavors.
