Do you ever make pickerel fish cakes? Thats how we used to do it. We would gut them and bake them in the oven for about 10 mins or however long it took to crisp the skin up some so it was easy to pull off.

Once that time was up we would peel the skin, cut the head and tail off (if we didn't do that off the bat) and run the entire fish through an hold table mounted grinder - bones and all. We would do that a few times and use it to make cakes.

We tried to only use bigger fish so you could grab the backbone and pull out most of it - but whatever didn't come up got ground up.

definitely very good to eat. Never tried to fillet them like you are describing but I might have to give that a try. Thanks for the diagrams and descriptions