DNS infrastructure is really interesting. I did a bit of a deep dive on it a few months ago, culminating in running my own authoritative name servers [0] for a while.
One neat way of retaining that control is running your own SOA(s), but getting robust secondaries and listing those in WHOIS so that they take all of the wild queries. Then you just work with your little SOA and everything just propagates as necessary and you don't get hammered.