I think another problem that I had as the game continued was information overload. I had so many instances of people playing townie or scummy at the time that it blew my gogdamn mind trying to stick an alignment down for people. I thought PJB was town, though I flipped that read in the last phase. I thought Pawn was town and that read slowly flipped as well. I waffled on Soup the entire game.
When you don't have a paper trail at all, you're just playing D1 over and over again until it happens. That's all Cycle 1 really was: D1. And it just....trashed my mind. I couldn't stick a read down, nor be confident on all except a few reads (Gheb/Circus, WOTT). When you have 89 pages to work with, you can find examples of anyone being town or scum and that is not at all beneficial to a game where you have to read people.