PvE, Henchmen, different characters

This is just some of my thoughts based on my experience playing GW so far. If any passionate flamers out there happen to read this and start to light your torches - just breath, relax and feel free to give a calm and thoughtout opinion.
This post in not aimed at well organized Guilds and organized players who all team up together and work well as a team. This post is about the plenty of others out there...

Well I've read a few posts where:
- players praise/complain about the henchmen and some debate over the use of henchmen instead of other players.
- players who spend most of their time playing by themselves using only henchmen and dont often team up with human controlled players in PvE.
- players who wish that henchmen's armor and weapons could be customized, like in DiabloII LOD.
- players have 4 characters that they regularly alternate between.

In summary, many players who, a lot of time, play the game just by themselves:
- find that henchies are just a little less than what they'd like
- while human players are much better, you have to reply on other people to work together.
- find that forming a group of human players can drag the game out a bit

So I was just thinking, why not make your spare characters selectable as henchmen? This way:
- they'd be highly customizeable
- you could evenly lvl up your characters
- players who spend most of their time playing 'single player' could potentially have a richer/more flexible RPG experience as they're developing a team of champions and not a single one - repeatedly leveling from lvl 1-20 over and over...
- perhaps you could even switch btw characters while you're playing...?
- could really speed up the teaming process for missions - cut back on the amount of "team of 7 LF Monk," "group of 7 LF tank"
- anyone not wanting/liking this option need not do it
- of course there'd need to be some rules for obvious reasons... something like "only spare characters of equal level are selectable," or something...?

Anyone have any thoughts or ideas of their own regarding this?

I use hench for the following simple facts...

1. smarter then the average player
2. follow directions/commands and don't usually wander off on their own
3. don't aggro a group of minions and then yell "REZ ME YOU NOOB!" when they die.
4. never drop from a group after getting a share of all your gold.

Now I would like to see more stuff possible to do with them. Such as armor and weapons upgrades, maybe learned skills. You know, stuff that only you have access to with your account.

I totally dig the "use other characters as hench" cause my lv20 characters would be by my side since the first day of my second character... which is probably why that would never happen... I wish you could take control of hench if you die... and that they would infuse when you do instead of sucking badly struggling to remain alive.

Over all I'm pretty content with henchmen... but yes, they could always be better.

A level restriction on the character henchies would help, to the level that the current henchies are.