Thanks for all the good suggestions, some of the techniques I will likely put to use once I actually try to start smoothing.
As I mentioned, at this point I am only trying to roughly redistribute dirt from large piles dropped into a gully to taper a 3' height difference from what was once an ancient creek path (in woods). The rear blade, while not the right tool for the job still seems better than the front loader for my current situation as I only have room to practically maneuver the tractor in one dimension (e.g. 12-15' x 80' area). Turning is a pain as I have limited width and there is a bit of slope as I fill in the bank. Additionally, the piles are packed so hard (clay) that I make two linear forward/back passes with the rear blade in the time I break loose half a load into the bucket to move.
I am only pulling with the rear blade at this point (haven't even tried pushing) as it is the only way to bite into the packed clay. I did experiment and found that once distributed and broken loose, it seems to be a trivial effort to smooth either pushing or pulling.
I was being somewhat facetious on the head hitting the ROP comment. This issue is not speed as I'm barely crawling. The issue is that I was dragging loads which unless I take additional time to coarsely feather out (even though I'm just trying to move the dirt at this point - hence this thread) I create what amount to large speed bumps. When you back over them slowly you just get a bumpy ride. If you go them at just the right angle you get a condition where one rear wheel is going up ~6" while the other wheel is coming down the other side of the speed bump. This movement at the base of the tractor translates into fairly large movements on the ROPs. Even this is still manageable until the operator gets lazy with head placement near the ROPs and takes his eye off the ball because of distractions - In my particular case it was a horse fly which decided to torture me throughout my entire second evening on the dirt pile.
At the moment we seem to have thunderstorms here about ever 2-3 days so I'm currently on hold.
I believe I can almost double the amount of dirt I can drag if I just had side wings on the blade, so I'm seriously comptemplating making throwaway side wings out of some old 2x8s and 2x4s I have laying around. I think I see how I could build them in about 10 minutes. If it works out and they don't look too embarassing, I will post some pictures.
I will check into the rake rental as I do have a number of golf ball sized rocks I would like to get up before I layer on my topsoil. I will also be building skid shoes before winter, but I don't think I'll need them for this project.
