Designing a consumer product would require you to do curve projection at least one time unless you are in search of an overall shape. When you do a cutout of a panel/surface in order to insert a piece it is wise to fillet the edges of both pieces for rendering purposes so it ends up looking more convincing but sometimes you really need a bigger gap between two panels/surfaces. This is where some sort of gap tool creation would come in handy just to interactively expand or resize the existing gap when you do curve projection. So far one of the workarounds has been to do offset of the cutout which gives you a leeway to do proper bigger filleting of the edges to close the gap (that way it looks more pronounced in the render). I am not aware of any other workarounds cause I'm lazy to do some creative thinking.
