Hi,
The thing is, adaptive clearing requires a slightly different mindset than regular pocketing/profile cutting. When doing regular 2D contours, you have a large cutter engagement (50% when cutting a slot/profile) so you typically go easy on the depth of cut (e.g. your “.5mm at a time”), but use a large stepover (40-50% is typical). Now the whole point of adaptive clearing (and high-speed machining in general) is instead to use a much lower cutter engagement (as you noted) BUT at a higher feedrate and deeper depth of cut, and having the CAM tool figure out a toolpath that will maintain the cutter engagement constant.
DISCLAIMER: you did not tell us which material your Hammond boxes are made of, so I’ll assume it was aluminium. If it is anything harder than that, the rest of this post is partially invalid.
I suspect you may have been reusing feeds and speeds that work for regular profile cuts, in your adaptive clearing toolpaths ? If I look at your data, you are using a 2 flute 1/8" endmill (#102Z), at 15.000RPM (2.5 on the CCrouter), with 0.5mm stepover, and 300mm/min feedrate.
The corresponding chipload is 300 / (2 x15000) = 0.01mm = 0.00039", but in reality due to chip thinning induced by the small stepover (0.5mm over 3.175mm = 16% stepover), the actual chip thickness is 1.4 times lower, so you end up cutting chips that are 0.0003" thick. That’s about three times lower than the “magical” chip thickness value for metal which is 0.001", and that’s not even taking into account the fact that you used feed override to a lower feedrate, so in reality your chipload was probably even smaller. It does not mean it cannot work, it means you will be operating very near the limit where the cutter can start rubbing metal rather than cutting, and when this happens you get melting, and clogging of the flutes, as I understand you saw. If you are not using some kind of air assist for clearing chips AND a sharp/fresh #102Z, I’m not too surprised that you would get a c****y cut at these settings.
So my opinion is that you should go two to three times faster (i.e. 1000mm/min feedrate), use a little bit of WD40 and/or an air blast, use a deeper depth of cut (say 3mm) with helical ramping, and suddenly you’ll fall in love with adaptive clearing like the rest of us 
FYI, here’s an example of cutting parameters I used for cutting aluminium using adaptive clearing and the #102Z, and that got me nice results.
N.B: also, while I’m a fan of the Sex Pistols, I’m not sure the title of the post complies with the etiquette of the forum