Oh thanks Mike. Makes very good sense. I'll give the cylindrical approach one more go by cutting the UV seem above, down the middle and shift the half of the faces for a better seem. It helped a lot looking at your texture.
On dominant areas, basic artistic principles on draw attention to the face and eyes applies to UV mapping as well? That was an eye opener. No pun intended. More UV space equals more texture resolution I take it, but won't things start to stretch out of control?

I followed Serverinianthony's recommendation to UV map a simple cube, and shoosh was that helpful. From this it became clear that planar maps are very easy to work with, I learned about projection height and projection width to unify scale and control the coverage with it.

Flip UV's also became integral on some of the faces. If you have numbers on the UV checker you'll instantly see that some of the numbers are showing backwards. A simple flip UVs for that face takes care of it. Very neat that you can flip both horizontal and vertical.

Who knew UV mapping was so much fun