Every time I review some package for sponsoring, I usually end up suggesting to fix some of more picky things which lintian finds. It looks like everybody is using default set of checks and does not look at others. Indeed the defaults tell about things which are really errors or need override, but --pedantic and --display-info show also useful hints. However you need to take them more as a suggestions than as a errors.
What I usually find interesting is --pedantic, because it tells about several things, which might be good idea to have in your package. Missing Homepage in debian/control is one of them and I believe this should exist for every package which has a homepage.
The --display-info (or just -I) is also useful, for example it does spell checking of texts in binaries and man pages. Registration into doc-base is also useful integration into the system and you should definitely do it if the package provides documentation in HTML.
To run these checks every time, you can create alias in your ~/.bashrc:
alias lintian='lintian -I --pedantic'
I still think it's a pity that lintian does not support a per-user configuration file, e.g. ~/.lintian, in which these parameters could be hard coded.