stefan_berlin said:

One habit that pays for itself: post the method alongside the number.

I am going to disagree with the direction of travel here. The thread has converged on the tidiest answer rather than the best-supported one, and those are not the same thing.

stefan_berlin said:

One habit that pays for itself: post the method alongside the number.

No disagreement, though the timescale matters more than the mechanism here. Most of what looks like a difference in kind turns out to be a difference in how long somebody waited.

stefan_berlin said:

One habit that pays for itself: post the method alongside the number.

Thank you — that is the clearest version of this I have read, and I have read a lot of them. I will report back once I have actually tried it.

From the other side of the consultation, briefly. Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then measure again under the same conditions.

That is the short version; the long version is somebody else's post.

OP back with an update, since a thread like this is useless without one.

Late follow-up. I did not do what was suggested, I did something adjacent, and it worked; posting the difference in case it matters to somebody.