some additional info on this particular subject, I did find this posting on Ask Tom:

http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/ask/f?p...:7246820117571

however, I seem to be running into results different than the testing shown on that post. Tom claims the segments should be reused by the tables the segments are allocated to w/o needing to truncate any tables. I will continue to work on my end to understand what are the possible causes of my dilemma.