It's been an interesting experiment. I am hoping that the end result will be a car that uses very little oil at 70k+ miles. I bought my e46 used at 37k miles, and it had had oil changes at 15k, 32k, and 37k. Once it reached 60,000+ miles it was using a quart of oil every couple of thousand miles. 'Normal' consumption according to BMW I know, but I'm hoping by doing the changes more regularly I'll avoid or reduce that with the one series.
Updated my oil filter pics with the 3rd change. The change in the amount of particles in the oil filter is a very welcome sight:
first change: 1200 miles:
2nd change: 5100 miles
3rd change: 10600 miles
The filter did dry out on this third picture as I left it a couple of days before taking a picture. It looked infinitely better this time around.
Although the filter is obviously doing it's job and these particles are in the filter and not floating around the engine, I definitely feel better about reducing the OCI, especially for the first few changes.