Plot Bunny: "Damage"
At the end of "Damage", Andrew is getting in Angel's face with a dozen Slayers behind him, and then they put Dana in their van and drive off.
When Andrew is doing the pissing contest with Angel, he rubs in the spice with "... and none of them have ever dated you".
There are a few ways they could've gone with that scene, if they had tried to get the actors back. I think the most interesting would be to have Faith pop out and say "the darkness won't swallow her up", but the crowd-pleaser of course would be SMG coming out and saying "And Buffy says..."
I mean, there's a power in sending the B team. There's a power in keeping the people you think you can manipulate or reason with out of the picture, so you have no purchase to scramble for.
If money and relationships were no object, you still might not pull ED or SMG back in here. If you're gonna show Buffy knowing Spike's alive, are you gonna show it here? When Spike is slowly learning that he can't just be good now, because of all the bad he did?
If you could use all the chess pieces, "We'll use Angel and W&H to find her, then take over once they have her" doesn't sound like a Buffy plan. It works for the episode. It works to force Spike to engage with his past, help him realize that he, like Angel and Faith, have to pay for everything. So yeah, we'll go for that.
The question that comes to mind is how read into the drama the dozen Slayers are. Did they know that Buffy, the "Slayer Prime" or whatever they call her, dated him before they heard Andrew blurt it out? When they get to wherever and release Dana to probably Buffy, Willow and whatever medical/psychiatric help they can get their hands on, are there questions?
A lot of this depends on whether there's a Slayer School in Cleveland (implied by "Chosen", used in "Eyeless" and lots of others), a compound in Scotland (as shown in S8) or generally left in place with some guidance (kinda where I landed for "By The Book"). None of the dozen are from the Potentials, either, so they might not be primed for the soap opera, and what a disconcerting place to start learning the lore.
I have an idea based on this. If anyone else thinks this is a good idea, run with it. If you know someone ran with it, drop me a link.