Staples crush foam, kills the signal, every single time.

Man, I felt this one in my soul. My first two builds looked like a spider got into the zip tie bag and just went wild in there, cables crossing every which way and half of them sitting right in front of the bottom intake. I finally cleaned it up with velcro on build three and my GPU temps went down a few degrees, which made me feel dumb and happy at the same time. The worst part is you never notice it because the cables look "tidy" from the outside, but they're basically a wall blocking half your fan. Now I route everything behind the tray and keep the front as empty as I can. Lesson learned the hard way, same as you.

Pushing that scoring sheet further, you could track which categories actually get people riffing, since dead air and confusing plot probably carry way more weight than bad acting. Do that for a few months and you'll have a real system instead of just vibes.