Thanks for all the tips and suggestions!
Love sliced grilled eggplant, especially with a more delicate eggplant like Japanese or the variety I've only once successfully grew it up here in the cold-and-short-summer PNW.
For baba ghanoush, caponata and the like, the eggplant flesh is supposed to be mushy, where if you peel and toss out the skin, you essentially have eggplant baby food, and then you mix that with tahini, lemon juice, garlic or diced tomatoes, peppers, capers, etc. for caponata. I've cooked eggplant whole before on a gas grill and roasted it in the oven, but thought it would be cool to also get that smoky flavor since eggplant has a tendency to be bland by itself. I imagine a smoke-infused pulp would hardly need any extra ingredients at all (well, maybe salt) to be yummy smeared on some hot fresh pita/bread. Will have to experiment.