Bear with me - thought process first, then conclusion - and I may edit it LOL
I will try something different with my next seedling. In the last pic I posted there are several kola outgrowing the others. Out of curiosity I traced them each back to my 4 end limbs, the 4 middle ones are lagging a little. Even the tall ones in the center are ones branching off of the ends and trained into the middle.
Fact: stems deliver food - bigger stems deliver more food and make bigger buds I looked underneath and saw something (I found) interesting.
Where the orange lines meet the red one you can see where this end limb was topped again. The red part is before I topped each limb, and it is pretty much the same diameter until I topped it, regardless of leaving shoots to grow or not.
The red circles are the five cola from the other pic, the blue ones are from the other 'end' branch.
All 5 of those orange branches (secondary shoots) are the same diameter, all coming off the same limb. The two at the top are no bigger than the ones left on below them.
all 5 of those secondary limbs are the taller flowers above even though they are all coming off the same branch!
The blue limb (tertiary shoot) was not worth leaving.
By comparison, the 4 middle limbs off the manifold (purple line) are only a little larger than those secondary shoots off the ends.
If I had not topped it, and just let it grow until flip - leaving shoots along the way, I think the stem diameter would have stayed pretty much the same, gradually getting smaller.
I think that 4 initial stems on the manifold will be better. The topping for 8, instead of sing Nebula's version like I have been. I re-read through Nugbuckets version and saw several different styles, and I think he did one like that.
I also think that using the 3rd node off of each initial part of the manifold would be better than the 1st node so the stems get fatter before more work is done.
I think that each branch left on the 4 limbs has the potential to produce the same as one of the middle 4 would. Or basically, get the 4 limbs started and let it go until you want to flip. Topping each a week before flip might be good too.
This shape would also make it easy to fill in a square scrog perfectly.
INPUT WELCOME!!!