Ugh, I hope it's not a deal-breaker that my grid uses ten of the entries from your list, Glenn9999. 
There's a reason why those words are common. Mainly with the way the "grid rules" are laid out in American crosswords (mainly the "minimum of black space" rule, and the "no isolated words" rule), it puts words and phrases with vowels in them at a premium. Hence, they repeat so much. It lends an element of boredom to a lot of grids since by necessity of these they're so similar (I could roll out a list of the top 1000 and one would master crossword solving simply by knowing those), but people are so wedded to the "mash-up" grid that there's really no other way but to use these words ad nauseum.
