Ross, I was trying to have a look at your site, (
http://www.rmrrestorations.co.uk/) is it down at the moment? Would love to see progress on that rod with 928 V8 and your Ghia.
That's the advantage for the bug spindle with the high steering arm, although some 928 spindles had a bolt on arm which I would think could be modified although I didn't look into it in detail.
As for using the original centre section of the beam, for making a bug handle you would need some weight up front to get a bigger balance, making it lighter would just make things harder to tune! Picking up on points on the chassis which were designed to take these loads seems an obvious solution to me. Particularly in the case of my speedster, I need all the weight up front I can get, although I won't go as far as actually adding sand bags
Rich