I use ABE only because it's enabled by default and it seems like a sensible thing to do. At the time I tested pi-hole, reverting to router hosts blocking seemed easier so I left it at that. Maybe I'll look at it again and see if I can selectively disable ABE for the pi-hole's IP address which should solve the issue.

Hmm, I think ABE works back-to-front of what you want, eg http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20111530/noscript-abe-all.... You let a remote page have access to local data, so you'd need access rules for all the external pages that are adblocked to let them have access to the local content that pihole wants to stuff the ad spaces with.

This might work, using https://noscript.net/abe/abe_rules.pdf, but I'd ask at the NoScript forums. The rules cascade so it would need to go at the top.

    #ABE rules
    # ALL matches any URI
    # accept lets it happen, sandbox and anon probably would be fine too
    # INCLUSION is any sub-page level part, like images and such, can specify further which inclusions
    # LOCAL is any local address including those in noscript.ABE.localExtras (see about:config);
    Site ALL
    Accept INCLUSION from LOCAL
    # Deny # probably only needs that if you're not prepending already made rules??

That might negate much of ABE though as you're letting external sites reference anything that they find on the local domain.

Let me know if it works!

For me the big difference is management - pihole has a nice interface and there are a bunch of browser extensions compatible with it, you can exclude all of their lists and start from scratch.