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I generally leave the job of dishing out damage for vehicles, veterans, etc. I have found that basic infantry squads and conscripts excel at:
a) holding objectives
b) tarpitting (or speedbumping) scary CC deathstars, and
c) catching bullets/human cover saves
Yep, you usually want to have a commissar or priest attached to a big blobs to make them hard to shift, but why sink lots of points into guys who honestly won't rack up that many casualties? If you can get a rapidfire FRFSRF off, terrific, but that doesn't require 100 points (equal to 2 more infantry squads or 25 conscripts and a priest) of power axes and melta bombs to do. Just bodies and a command squad. Now, I will admit that if upgrades start making your blob scary enough that your enemy starts focusing weapons that direction rather than towards your Emperor's Wrath Artillery Company etc., then the psychological value of those upgrades and keeping your vehicles alive makes up for the cost.

tl;dr I go for leadership/morale upgrades, rather than worry about damage output. I think that whole unit cover/invul saves would be worth it too, for sufficiently large blobs.

 Krusha wrote:
I take a 50 man blob with five auto cannons, melta bombs for sergeants and an aegis line, then castle them up in a corner.

The autocannons add range, punch and versatility. With orders, it's only really heavy armour that they can't hurt. In my last game I took out a flying hive tyrant and it was glorious.

Where do opponents tend to place the "backfield HW blob in cover" in terms of target priority? Are people usually distracted by the big guns on treads, or are they quick to mop up the soft T3 bodies with only a cover save as protection? It's a tactic that does have some appeal to me, though without an objective to camp it otherwise feels somewhat expensive to field.

ExFideFortis wrote:
Try fielding Armored Sentinels in place of infantry. The most successful guard list I have run involves 0 infantry:

Emperor's Talon (9 Armored Sent.)
Emperor's Fist (5 LRBT)
Emperor's Wrath (Manticore, Bas. Bas.)

I use the Sentinels to do the jobs the infantry would otherwise do, and so far they have done a far better job, and survived far longer that my 60 guardsmen ever have. Not to mention they are a legitimate shooting threat, unlike guardsmen. 27 STR 6 PE shots per turn can do terrible things, however 200 lasguns does basically nothing.

Armored Sentinels: the Imperial Guard's almost-scatbikes.