I tried for a while today to go back toward our July 16th alignments, as suggested by Sheila in alog 30648. I put offsets in POP_A and the SOFT loops to try to make the witnesses/oplevs go back toward their July16th values.
I only made the DARM spectrum worse, not better. In the attached screenshot, green is the spectrum before I started doing anything, pink is after my alignment work, and red is after taking the offsets out again.
I also attach a screenshot showing that the buildups and the recycling gain all deteriorated while trying to go back to July's alignment. To be fair, I was not able to get all optics' witnesses back to their July values, so it's still not really the same alignment, but I think it's closer than what we usually run with. I don't really think that this is a fruitful direction to continue to persue unfortunately, especially in light of what has just been discovered about the noise improvement when we close the DBB.