Hot take: I counted my trowel strokes on one wall and got 412, way more than I guessed
I laid a wall last Tuesday in a garage in Boise and got curious, so I counted every pass of the trowel for the whole face. Figured it would be around 200, turned out closer to 412 over about 3 hours of work. My foreman laughed and said the old guys on his crew used to joke that half the job is just spreading mud back and forth. What surprised me more was that saving strokes by laying bigger beds actually gave me a flatter wall with fewer cold joints. Anyone else ever tried tracking something like this, or am I just the weird guy with a notepad on site?
Try counting your setup moves next, because I bet the guys chasing 412 strokes are also the ones walking back to the bucket ten times an hour. Fewer trips and bigger beds keeps the mud warm and workable, which is probably why your wall came out flatter than the small-batch guys.