Watched my neighbor drop two hundred bucks on that exact fix last month.

This is the same thing that happens when people try to organize their whole house at once, it all falls apart because you're forcing a system that fights the natural flow. Same with my closet, I stopped cramming everything into bins and just hung what I wore and let the rest sit, and somehow that worked better than any fancy setup. Sometimes the fix is just to stop forcing it and let things land where they actually want to go.

Pre bending the corners changed everything for me too. What helped was using a scrap piece of the same size pipe to practice on first, so I could see how much spring back I was getting before touching the real run. Getting that bend started about an inch back from where you want your corner keeps the radius from getting pinched. Took me a few tries to get the feel but now my corners line up way better and I'm not fighting the pipe as much.