The benefits of the synergy found between alloy design, microalloying and controlled deformation processing are now widely appreciated and routinely achieved in hot strip and plate mills around the world. This understanding of thermomechanical processing (TMP) pertains mainly to thin gauge products of thickness falling in the range between approximately 1.5 to 25 mm. There are, however, new frontiers where the required knowledge and understanding of austenite conditioning and transformation control fall outside this typical universe of TMP. Two very different but important cases, in particular, are: (i) achieving adequate grain refinement in as-rolled products such as heavy plates, beams and tubes, where high deformation temperatures and very slow cooling rates are normal; and (ii) obtaining the proper microstructure during continuous cold mill processing of very thin (0.5mm) dual-phase (D-P) and TRIP steels on hot-dipped galvanizing (HDG) lines, where intercritical annealing and the post-annealing cooling path are important.