"wow, cycles was my favorite metric in the campaign, surely this will be really fun since I actually have experience in the metric"

anyways, the solution title probably tells you where that went. I tried for so long to get 23 cycles, what I would consider "reasonable min," and I congratulate anyone who got there, but I have successfully defeated the sunk cost fallacy by dealing with the inadequacy of mys solution and just delaying it, and am almost certainly done for this metric of the puzzle. I'm pretty sure that theory min id 20 c, via grabbing a seventh reagent to speed up the creation of the sixth product, with theoretically just enough speed gain to turn in that sixth product in just before the fifth, though I wouldn't be surprised if either the geometry of that would be impossible, nor if I've missed something entirely and first place somehow pulls 19 c