What might be best practice to interact with line items when a Quote is requested on SC site? Trying to handle scenario where item has no price at all (which causes error).

following. I am intererested to know how this works without setting a price on item record. One of our earlier implementations had to set price to zero to get around Quotes.

Ya that's where we ended up so far - setting items to $0 and then hiding price in a few places via extension.