This was a fun read! I liked your point early on re: moral scrupulosity. I struggled with that growing up, and I still see small remnants of it as an adult -- one of those remnants, for me, is also shipping categories on AO3! Actually, when I first started posting on my current AO3 account, I was careful to make sure that the shipping categories were perfectly even at the end of the week. IIRC I decided that 2 M/M, 2 F/F, 1 M/F, and 1 GEN fic per week was the magic number. I maintained that system for probably a year and a half before the intense need to keep them even faded, and M/M gradually took over.

(Luckily, thanks to events like Femslash February and my resurgent interest in Riker/Troi, I've been able to up the F/F and M/F numbers again 😆)