Yes, I want (in some cases) to use headlines for purposes of organization.
 I want at least some of them to disappear in the output.

I could turn in a request for a feature, here:

#+OPTIONS: H:1 lower:nil

Or something else that would give the option that instead of automatically
converting all lower order headlines into list elements, to ignore them
entirely.  Of course, the case may exist where one wishes to actually have a
list converted as is, but lower level headings to disappear.

Thanks for the information about configuring converstion to \section{},
\subsection{}, \paragraph{}, etc.

Aloha,

Alan