I have found that longer basing gave higher yields when going from a few minutes to one hour. Will try a full day. The increase in yields was maybe 20% or so.

Is the salted #3 experiment crashing? The bottom of the paper strip is not very red (looks orange), you may need more citric acid for crashing to happen. See below for one of my examples that crashed to beautiful active xtals, posted earlier. Notice there is no orange color on the right edge of the pH paper that was dipped in ethyl acetate. The green side is lighter than yours, but that was for the combined pulls, the first pull was as dark as your first pulls.

The blob holding on to the mescaline is a good question. Yields seem good so I'm not too worried about it to first order. I threw water and ethyl acetate to one of the blobs and it did not seem to release anything.

If you can get the cloudiness to crash, we will have process that was reproduced. Also, any results with malic?

Thanks for the good work shroombee.