I've been reading that article with great interest because 2 weeks ago I was performing a deep review of the available approaches to deploy my OS ISOs (XP and W7) from an E2B UFD.

I tested all methods described here and at RMPrepUSB site, and those listed in your above article.

Honestly, my conclusion was that WinNTSetup was the most straightforward and "clean" approach since it doesn't require "pre-processing" of OS sources (imgPTN conversion, Rufus creation, WinSetupFromUSB creation, etc). I was surprised this software solution wasn't mentioned in the article, because is perfectly compatible with E2B in regards to the "easy to maintain" concept.

Actually using it is like "Install from PE" method, but you can use it for deploying any Windows. And it handles "custom" ISOs (driverpacks, post-install activity) just fine. Even the W7 install problem I described before didn't happen on VBox, because WinNTSetup set up properly in advance the bootldr+BCD chain, before first reboot, avoiding W7 setup "guessing".

And please note that I LOVE your imgPTN option. Actually I don't mind converting my W7 to imgPTN since I usually have to modify original sources to suit my needs, so it saves me from the re-create ISO step. Since I can mount with ImDisk in read-only mode, it also ensures that imgPTN remains untouched after creation.