@Geoff
The southlands list and the Red host are two very different creatures. On the one hand, the skink cohorts in the southlands list are worthless. At 6 points they have all the cc weaknesses of normal skinks and no added benefits. However, with the southlands list one gets to use the short bow! If you look on ebay you can find people selling 200 of them at a time for under 20 dollars. In my southlands list i use 160 of these skinks armed with short bows, and if you throw in two units of salamanders and some kroxigors that can charge through them, you have an incredibly powerful (and slighltly cheesy) list.
Unforuntately the Red Host is not even considered legal at most tournaments (although red crested skinks are pretty great).
As far as Horned Ones go, I made my own. Although you can use the DOW skink riders, you can also find on ebay (a theme arises) old dark elf cold one knights for cheap (horned ones are just old cold one models fyi), or you can just buy the old cold one models as bitz. Then you just glue a skink on after fiddling with his legs a little and you'll save 20-30%. That said, for what they do Horned Ones are a little overpriced points-wise for what they do.