In the beginning of my career - tens of thousands of moons ago - I primarily used spot metering with slide film. I shot manually, meter some important tone,
compensated for the reflectance and did well. But digital made it easier.
I used to use the RGB histogram and ETTR. But, often a small amount of highlights was difficult to detect on the histogram, so the last three years I simply go by the highlight alert and add light until the first blinkies appear and typically go with that and do great.
I shoot RAW only, so the first blinkies do not mean anything is overexposed,
just getting close. Remember the histogram and highlight alert in-camera come from the embedded JPEG in a RAW file, and they indicate overexposure before the RAW data is truly overexposed. I am "older than mud" as some kids I know say,
and in need of eye surgery, so I find flashing highlights much easier to see than tiny bits of data on the histogram curve. So far, over 250,000 images, it has worked just fine.,
and it is so easy. Though, you could have some tone problems if your subject is largely one color, such as all red.

Glad to be of help with the thread. Just trying to help spread the word on a far more useful way to use automatic exposure, and that indeed is what it is. Still, I would never use it when I am doing floating blind photography (my favorite type of wildlife photography by far) as having birds swim from a light blue background to a dark green one or having a duck with lots of white feathers continually change how much white occupies the image by moving closer or further away would be a disaster, or at least not nearly as precise. There, full manual exposure reigns supreme. And I don't mean to beat up aperture-priority, but I have no idea why any photographer would want to have to deal with its problems needlessly, especially in wildlife photography. I tried to embrace it on this past safari in Kenya, and I ended up abandoning it to move on to a much better method that many of you already knew. I was a little late to the "party", but then I shot Canon and only recently has EC become available on some models. By the way, I now just use Evaluative all the time and go with the highlight alert indicator. I find Evaluative ( A canon term I think) gets you pretty close nearly all of the time. Seldom to I have to use EC by more than plus or minus 1 stop.

John, thank you very much for your response. I'm not new to photography, having done some black & white film work in my younger years, but in transitioning to digital I sort of stayed at the "aim & shoot" stage without seriously exploiting the capabilities of these wonderful instruments. So I'm trying to break out of my rut and trying to "make" not just "take" pictures. I recently changed to back-button focusing on my Nikon, and am trying out M with Auto ISO. I think it's the way for me to go for most of my shooting. But I'm still working on the metering mode, hence the question I asked you. Your response is very encouraging and I thank you for sharing your expertise and insights.

What settings you use are highly dependent on two things
(1) noise on your camera at each ISO level.
(2) your tolerance for noise.

So, appropriate levels for you are something only you can determine, by trying your camera at various ISO settings.

As I indicated several pages back, I would be hard-pressed to make good use of this method right now, because I'm willing to use my cameras only in a very limited ISO setting band. Right now I'm using a Pentax K-30. but for a mere $1K I could purchase a Pentax KP, which is quickly earning a reputation for handling higher ISO values in a very graceful manner. Ever since the KP was announced, I've been looking forward to a world in which going to higher ISO values might provide new solutions to old problems ... and this might be another one of those.