You mentioned star trail photos, but stacking is for deep sky stuff where you want the stars to stay still. For actual star trails, you're just blending all the exposures together in something like Photoshop. The anchor point trick in DSS is for when you're trying to cancel out the earth's rotation, not show it.

I used to get mad at myself for scrapping a bunch of early drafts, like it was wasted time. Your sailcloth to workwear switch is a perfect example of why that's wrong though. All those "wrong" sketches just build the path to the idea that actually works.

Oh man, that sounds rough. But honestly, I kinda get where the guy was coming from. Sometimes you just want to try your own thing, you know?

That "extra ten seconds" thing is so true. I once bought a trade paperback online that was listed as volume one, but the cover photo was actually for volume two.

Read an article about early plastic being made from milk, @betht32. Same idea, just using what they had.