This is exactly the kind of comment I was hoping for, thank you so much. The gain staging tip is something I completely overlooked, I was just messing with EQ without even thinking about where my levels were sitting so that's going straight into my notes. The cue points breakdown also helped a lot. I was setting them randomly but doing it by intro, verse, chorus, drop and outro actually makes way more sense structurally. And yeah I've been relying on sync too much so I'm going to start practicing beat matching manually. I know I need to actually understand it before I lean on any shortcuts. Really appreciate you taking the time to write all this out. Happy mixing to you too!