Quote - Still not coming right...Perhaps I should avoid anything with a regular pattern altogether and stick to the asymmetrical.

Nah- don't let the polys defeat you, incognitas. The uv's will map image/procedural area to polys so all you need to do is get a calculator and work out your poly/image area's height/width and calculate how many times you need to repeat your brick texture upwards and acrosswards to get a reasonable brick pattern. You might have to edit your original texture to make it work the way you want. If it's a procedural texture, try fiddling with the values in the offsets i.e don't tile 4x4, tile 20x7 or something.
Keep going!