Thanks Cheelin. So the goo issue remains a mistery.

One interesting thing I can update on is activated carbon (aka charcoal). The low dust product for aquariums worked great. It clears the EA from green color without the annoying difficult to filter black powder. However, it also made new water separate out (!). I think plant stuff helps mix the EA and water together, so there is more than the usual 3% water miscibility. Once that plant stuff was removed by the activated carbon the water in excess of 3% separated out. I think this is an interesting observation/effect I was not aware of.

For the record, I see no practical upside to removing the color at this time, reused solvent has worked fine after a simple sodium carb saturated water wash.

I don't know if this variable amount of added water could be the source of goo for some. Don't think so, but I thought it was an interesting observation. Maybe some cacti have more of this water/EA mixing compounds (?).

Chemichally drying before salting with Na2CO3 would control the water variability. I can't reccomend it because I saw no upside or downside to doing it. We need someone that gets goo to split the extract and chemichally dry a subset of it as a test.