Me sealing foam before shaping is my version of touching a hot stove twice, learned the hard way too.

Haha yeah the tapping test will humble you real quick. Forty years of a wall holding up beats any excuse I can come up with for skipping the butter. On long runs I keep that bucket right on the line like you said... once I stop moving the trowel it's over, I start telling myself the next one can slide. Setting up a few at a time sounds smart but in my hands they just sit there drying while I fuss with the corners. So it's one at a time for me, butter, set, tap, next.

But gallery lighting is a whole different thing from editing on a screen. Those little lamps aren't showing you the "true" version of your work, they're adding a warm cast that flatters almost anything. If you adjust your files to look good under that glow, they'll probably look way too warm and punchy everywhere else, like on a client's laptop or a plain white wall. Bumping blacks and warming highlights for one specific room feels like chasing the room instead of fixing the file. Better move is to get a decent monitor and calibrate it, then trust that, because at least it's consistent. You can't control every place your work gets seen, so matching one gift shop is a losing game.