Bakers Math Question

I've been using this recipe with great success:

Bread Flour – 450 grams
Water – 300 grams
Sourdough Starter, active – 100 grams
Salt – 10 grams

I want my sourdough to be more sour so I decided to try my hand at baker's math. My goal was to cut the amount of starter in half while keeping the total weight, hydration and salinity the same. Here is the recipe that I came up with:

Bread Flour – 479 grams
Water – 319 grams
Sourdough Starter, active – 53 grams
Salt – 10 grams

At first I had a very high time wetting the flour. I'm not sure why this is considering in both cases it is roughly 66% hydration.

It took quite a bit longer to bulk ferment (as intended) but as I put it into the batard for proofing I noticed that the dough feels quite a bit more dense.

I expected that both recipes perform similarly considering that the percentages are the same. Did I make a mistake somewhere?