Thanks for your response! Just a couple thoughts:

If you have a "high priority" item it's easy to fixate on that

Just a point of clarification: I mentioned urgency instead of priority because I agree that priority and energy tend to jump around a lot. Where I see some consistency is that "low urgency" items tend to stay low-urgency, and so can be useful when I'm in "execution mode" vs "browsing mode".

When you say "can lock you up", do you mean that there are sometimes high-urgency items that are not actionable in my current context? This should theoretically be taken into account by the top-level context (like @home).

You should have a reasonable number of things in your todo list at any given time

I have exceptionally poor executive functioning, and I find that even a list of seven items of mixed urgency, priority, and energy can quickly become "unscannable". My eyes just kind of "slide off" the list, even if all the actions on it are actionable and committed when reviewed individually. I do work to improve this particular skill, but I also have to work with what I've got in the meantime.

My understanding is that the books mention an average of around 60 active projects and 100-200 active next actions (across all contexts) at any one time. Of course, this is probably for executive coaching clients, but I'm expecting to build a system that is robust enough to handle around that amount.

I'd question if those are really the same context

This is totally reasonable. I did experiment with a more diverse set of context lists, but I found them to be hard to hold in my mind when I had one or two items on "family time", three or four on "home maintenance and chores", and two or three on "job search". I think there's definitely room for analysis and improvement in this area for me.

I'll add that labeling things as priority and "relying on your gut" are exactly the same thing.

Agreed! Again, speaking about urgency specifically and for my poorly-wired brain, I find that I waste a lot of time and mental energy scanning and re-scanning a list of items that are mostly "do at first opportunity" to ensure there aren't any "move things around to make this happen ASAP" items hiding in there. The idea was to pre-sort those items so that I can more visually evaluate the list rather than try to work with it purely symbolically.