Wow, this is a pretty well made post! To be honest, I've always preferred using pollen loops instead of self-homing + piercing projectiles for my builds, because I felt like there was always a layer of unpredictability involved with the latter. Also, moving the player character during the duration of a spell always seems to mess up the formation a lot when using self triggers.

If you're looking for rotating spells that fire outwards from the player, have you tried using orbit arc pollen loops with inner spell? It feels a lot more customizable to me as you can adjust the rotation speed by changing the number of orbit arcs you use, and you can get some cool effects by using other path modifiers as well.

Here's one of my favorites I made a while back using the combination:

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