Warm beer" is the perfect way to put it. Paid mixers here are just a cover charge to stand in a crowded room with bad lighting. I went to one in Midtown, forty bucks, and the only real talk I had was with the bartender. The free stuff wins every time. Tuesday at the Village, or just hitting a coffee shop and chatting up strangers, beats any ticketed networking thing I've tried. Save your money.

The part that really gets me is how long you ran it before catching it. Forty minutes to build the jig, then you probably drilled a whole pile of studs in like five minutes flat, and every one of them was junk. That's the worst trade off. You save twenty minutes of marking and lose three hours of rework. What I've started doing is the same thing you said at the end, but I go one step farther and run a full dry layout on the floor with one stud before I commit. Lay the plate down, set the first stud where it goes, check the hole against where the box actually lands, then cut loose. Cost me maybe two minutes and it's caught a bad setup twice now. The other thing nobody talks about is that a jig makes you faster at being wrong. Hand marking, you'd notice around stud three that something looked off. With a jig you just feed them through and trust it, so the mistake stacks up in a big pile before your brain kicks in. Speed hides errors. Same reason guys cut a whole bundle of rafters on one bad setting and then stand there looking at a stack of firewood.