Here are some examples of situations I've run into when using Hive. Adding them here in case anyone else (or myself) needs a reference to use when setting up similar cases.
This is an example where an external table uses partitions to incorporate data from many different subdirectories. When this was made I wasn't able to change the Hive configuration to use hive.mapred.supports.subdirectories=TRUE; and mapred.input.dir.recursive=TRUE; so I had to come up with a way around it. In other environments using the previously mentioned settings may be preferable.