Wow what a lot of catching up on the thread I had to do. You guys have been hard at the discussion in the new year and that is really encouraging. A couple of topics I will add my two cents to for what its worth.
It id going to be difficult to mention individually but congratulations to all those with PBs, the thread members seem to be making awesome progress, fantastic stuff.
Cross on the bottom:- I solved with cross or face on the top from 1981 until 2010 so it was a really new concept for me when starting CFOP. I think I originally used Badmephistos videos as I did for a lot of things and it was just practice, practice. I do remember trying to first plan two edges, then three, then four and even to this day I cannot always plan the alignment of edges to centres at the end. This is more laziness than anything. Cross optimisation is on my to do list!
Counting of Solves With New Algs:- I have fallen foul of this previously. I learned most COLL subsets and WV in the past and lost them because I did not use them enough. It would have been far better for me to do as others here have done and just not count that solve, good recommendation. I would do an average, come across a new case and just do what I was used to. This is part of the reason I have not timed a 3x3 solve since Birmingham Open and will not time one until the end of February:-
So, having learned and lost WV and COLL before and in a drive to crack that last 1/2 second to get sub 15 globally and in comp I am learning them again. More specifically I have now learned 54 Winter Variation cases. I am not timing any 3x3 solves and just doing slow exploratory solves for now. I am learning so much more edge control to try and force more WV cases and really questioning a lot of my F2L strategy, such as multi slotting or at least pair preservation.
In a week or so I will start on COLL again, hopefully a lot of the algs will come back to me quit easily and again slow solves to incorporate them. There is also another strategy to learning COLL. If for OLL parity on 4x4 you know a 1-edge flip alg and a 3-edge flip alg you can convert any OLL parity (50% of solves in theory, feels like 80% in reality!!) into a COLL case with EPLL or more change of PLL skip.
On the job front my redundancy started on 30th December I had a job interview on Wednesday (as many who are friends on FB will know) for a very exciting role. It is a company I know very well as it is an account I looked after in my last job. I think it went great and just waiting to hear back. Watch this space...
Best of luck to those in comp this weekend, especially my older UK brethen. Sorry I cannot be there but my interview was originally supposed to be for today but now I will be spending the day travelling to pick up my new VW toy - My other hobby
. OP corners is comfortable including cycle breaks and twisted corners. I don't think I'm going to absorb M2 quite so quickly. 
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