You betcha. (I was like, Telemundo?!) Thanks for the opportunity. We're all here to learn, and I (like you) learn by asking questions. I also learn by making mistakes, and I learn by teaching others. There's something special about this site: if you stick around, you'll get the answers you needed, and before too long you might decide to donate some money to the site and help other folks when they show up needing help. The PoolMath app alone has paid for itself countless times already. Dealing with my pool chems went from being unmanageably complicated to excruciatingly boring ... In about 6 weeks. I was right where you were more or less in mid June. We had bought 2 solar shock copper electrodes and were dumping all manner of potions and elixirs in the pool with no noticeable help and nobody to explain that with a CYA above 100, there was simply no way to have a safe, clean pool and everything else we were doing was a waste of time and money. I hemmed and hawed and split hairs and then just did the right thing and haven't once thought about going back to the pool store / internet superstition ways.
One of the things that helps me understand some of the "professional industry advice" is my career as an audio engineer. There's a saying that goes "There's no free lunch." Every change I make over here will affect things somewhere else, so we experiment, verify, measure, remain willing to change. Want a loudspeaker there? Okay, what do I trade off for that, because the flower lady at church just put a poinsettia in front of it. Want twice as many microphones onstage? That's going to affect how loud it'll get before things destabilize and feedback ruins everyone's time. Twist the wrong knob in front of the wrong person and your job and ability to get more work might be at risk. There are countless websites and magazines and equipment vendors and famous industry influencers that claim to have the cure for any number of easily preventable issues, and so much of it is complete superstition, buzz-words and alchemy... just like with pools.
City councils set noise level regulations for outside concerts that sometimes are impossible to be in compliance with, and sometimes they're extremely favorable. I have direct experience with this: One town I occasionally worked in was tired of the multiple noise complaints a week from residents from concerts and car stereos. They considered a motion to cut the allowable noise in the code by half: from ~100dB to 50 without two critical pieces of information: the dBSPL scale is logarithmic, and the a-weighted measurement they use largely ignores low frequency energy, which is the hardest to control and rattles the picture frames on your neighbor's walls. Cutting 100 dBa to 50 is clearly not "half as loud." In real life that's basically going from riding a commercial lawnmower to a quiet room. Bad idea. Cooler heads prevailed and the change wasn't adopted.
On the other side, I worked as a city employee in a town with a big summertime music festival. Since there were stages outside on city land, our department was in charge of measuring and enforcement of the city noise regulations, which were very specifically worded: an average level over several minutes a set distance from the source, a-weighted. Very reasonable. One night the headliner was Bootsy Collins, former bass player for James Brown and Parliament Funkadelic. A notoriously loud and raucous show and one of my "bucket list" must-see bands. They were legally in compliance the entire night because even though they definitely exceeded the max SPL at times during most songs, the average levels over time were much lower. The hardest part of that shift was standing next to the sound board and trying not to dance while sneaking glances at my handheld sound meter. But when you have an employee badge and a radio and a sound meter and a clipboard, slap a scowl on your face and you can basically go where you want at a music festival...
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