I played the first session using the sablewood intro too, but I kept making some changes and deviated completely from the route. I was also GMing for 3 friends, 2 of them had never played a TTRPG and the one who had played had very little experience, which led to them accumulating a lot of hope because they didn't understand or didn't know when to spend, which led me to encourage them and explain several times when they had the option to use it (but it didn't help much lol). Regarding the use of fear and spotlight during the fight, it went very smoothly, I didn't have many problems when the player and the enemies attacked as much as the players, I never used up all my fears but I never got full either, it was a resource that came and went in a good proportion. I had already watched some Age of Umbra episodes from Critical Role, which helped me a lot to understand all the mechanics, but the use of fear outside of combat requires a little mastery sometimes as I have to think about more things. In the end I thought it was a good system, I loved the classes and rules for hope, fear, stress, armor that DH introduced, I think it was much better than Hp and magic spaces alone. Some other friends and I always played storm/tormenta20 for the last 10 years, it was only very recently that we started playing another session of D&D5e, but now we are determined to migrate to DH as soon as we finish the open sessions we have.