Shorter pieces, especially in a large area, tend to produce a more busy appearance and excessive use of shorts just looks cheap. Hallways, closets, and smaller areas can look fine with shorter boards. There are some looks (like parquet) that use short boards for a specific look.

The best method is to glue it down but that is also by far the most expensive way too. You should be fine with stapling it down. I see no need to float it in your situation unless you just want to. The underlayment I mentioned was for a floating installation, not a glue down. The name is Sound Solutions and the absolute best padding I have worked with to date. It is expensive but it comes close to the "feel" of a fastened down floor... not hollow sounding or clicky-clock.

silly girl (I like your name) 1. with cedar, 1x6 is too thin (3/4"). I recommend 2x6 2. 2 2x6, as opposed to 1 2x12 3. that's a matter of taste. a lip is nice cedar is soft, and the outer tread will wear faster. it'll take a long time to wear down a 2x6...even cedar steve

Exactly, a bunch of expensive labor prep work with SLC has to be done first. As was previously said. Which the OP does not want to do. And they do not want to spend money on anything but the cheapest possible flooring and the cheapest possible way to install it. Which is a guaranteed failure. I am not going to argue any of these points further because 1. They are false, and 2. You and I apparently don't jive on how we outline our thoughts in text, because had you read any of my previous comments in the manner that I intended them, you might know that they are false. Flooring on top of flooring is still a hack install. It’s like shingles over shingles. Or vinyl siding over clapboards. There’s always someone who will do it. But that’s not the person you should hire. I believe there is a time and place for these type of installs. If you have never been in a situation where your roof has sprung a leak and you are not in a position to pay for a whole new roof, then great for you. But I know several people who have, and their only option was to patch the problem area with shingles over shingles and let that suffice until they could afford the new roof. This is akin to my situation. I have to do something about the tile. I will be doing a "hack job" on my tile regardless, because I know we can not go the proper route right now. Naturally, I would rather keep a single height of flooring in this area, so I posed the question about whether I could carry the flooring over the wood as well. I will repeat again that I don't think it's unreasonable or foolish or wasteful to want to spend a few extra hundred bucks and an extra day of personal labor to have one flooring type on our ground floor if we're going to be covering the tile anyway. This is all rendered quite moot, either way, because we have found that we can attempt the tile repairs ourselves. We had been told that tile repair/restoration was very expensive. We don't particularly care for the tile, so we decided we'd rather not spend money restoring it. We recently found products to fix the problem areas ourselves that may actually somewhat match. So at this point, we are just going to try that. Then if THAT fails, back to this floating floor dilemma.