Todd, more is more and your mind works a lot like mine: "Let's over-engineer this thing in our head and make it pretty," followed by "Oh crap what I want to do is beyond my technical skills/really hard to do/violates some principal law of physics."
Bruce's ideas are close to what I usually end up doing. But his are probably better. My only mod to his concept: drill a couple holes in your plate where it overlays the peak of your tubing, and plug weld through those. I like plug welds.
Also: where you bend over the plate, radius the edges before welding. Welds like curves better than corners.
Also: kudos on your design-build. This is all actually very fun, right? That's what I keep telling myself!