"I think I'm onto something here, I just need to game a bit harder" - me at several points while making this solve. I then proceeded to game progressively harder multiple times. Every time I submit this the solve name gets just a bit more confident in how hard I'm gaming

As for how this solve compares with theory, this is the minimum rate achievable without holding multiple metals in the output chamber at a time (improving rate of swapping metals on glyph of rejection) or using all 5 quicksilver per gold (reducing number of metal swaps). the later seems almost doable with this arrangement, as only one arm uses more than 8 cycles, and an 8-cycle loop would (as far as I can tell) allow for swapping metal out basically whenever.