Two hours for 40 frames at Flagstaff is fine but I would not call that a perfect session. I have had nights where the seeing was so bad every single sub was trash and I still got more keepers than that. The real thing nobody wants to say is that clear sky does not mean good sky. March in Arizona can look amazing and still have the jet stream parked right on top of you, which turns stars into fuzzy blobs no matter how dark it is. Your washout the next night might have saved you from processing 40 frames that looked sharp on the back of the camera and fell apart the second you stretched them. Shortest gap for me was about six hours, great at midnight, fog by sunrise, and honestly the fog night taught me more.

14 complaints from 100 perms is a 14% fail rate and you're ready to toss out your whole method? That's a tiny sample, man. Frizzy roots could just as easily be from the client's hair type, hard water, or how they wash it the first 48 hours. Bigger sections with a looser wrap might feel better now, but give it another 30 perms before you decide the old way was actually wrong.