Your title says you've been in the hobby for a year and have been struggling.....sounds like you are still "learning to walk".I don't take it personally and I appreciate your input. I'm trying to accomplish a very specific style of reefing. This isn't my first tank, and I've already "learned to walk" so to speak. I've been in this game a while and I wanted to do something different. Isn't that what this hobby is about? I know you can have a successful reef tank with minimal WC and dosing AFR. Plenty of people on this forum do it successfully everyday. It just gets a little frustrating when people want to steer the conversation in a different direction. It's like if I was trying to grow some rare, non photosynthetic coral that had a species specific diet of live bred food, and people replied with "just grow Xenia, it's easy". Is it true? Yes. Is it my goal? Not really. Either way, I'm pretty sure I've found the source of my issue, so I'm going to adjust my methods and try that. Happy reefing!
If you had stated the specifics of this method you were trying from the first post maybe this thread wouldn't have gone in several directions.