I too find looser better, but some resistance is helpful to create air turbulence to extract the load evenly
I find, at leat in the Zi, that it's not really turbulence that I need but rather creating a local partial vaccuum. I do tamp my ground loads surprisingly much and the added resistance gives some extra time for the hot air to exchange its calories to the load. When it's really too loose, I find that hot air just travels around the flying plant bits, taking the path of least resistance, and I end up sucking a lot of blank hot air and it's harder to the throat and less cloudy.
Remember that I always use it dry and take shorter hits, so I might need them to be denser to be appreciable vs a 30 sec draw through water where in the end you'll get a giant cloud anyways, whether it's more diluted or not. But there's a limit to how much you can tamp of course, as if you overdo it can create some tunneling effect where the air always follow the same restricted paths inside the load.
At one point early in the Zi thread I too felt maybe the beta team was sugar coating a bit. Then my Zion made it to me. I got it, I understood, and I then believed!
When I joined the alpha testing of the Zion, I thought it sounded a bit too good to be true (the ambiance and the way it developed made the thread almost unreal, we even thought at some point some astroturfing was taking place!) and honnestly I didn't even have very high hopes, as I imagined that it would be like my Firewood 2.1, that is a bit "nice but meh"!
Then I received it and wow, just wow! I've been genuinely blown away, this thing is that good really! If I have the choice, this is the only vape I use, period. But at first I thought this was perhaps due to my inexperience, I already had a lot of portables but only a single convection one (didn't have the Elo yet) so maybe it was just me discovering how a good portable convection vape should be. Still I was amazed by the amount of vapor it produced. I kept looking at my bowl in disbelief, trying to check whether I combusted or not because it was so thick. But nope, nada, zilch, niet, the load was always still greenish!
But then I heard the impressions from
@pakalolo and
@stickstones, whose experience and knowledge I deeply respect. Then the Z-team expanded, and we got more and more positive raving reports. I think if we cumulate the experience of all its members and if we line-up all vapes we collectively own or have tested, the entire spectrum would be covered and some more! We also had all kinds of usage patterns covered, from sippers to rippers, dry or with water, recreational and medical. At this point it was clear we had a gem in our hands. We're cheerleading for a good reason my friends, this device fucking rocks! It hits hard, it's easy to use, the taste is wonderful, maintainance is a breeze.
I don't have a Mi (yet) and I wasn't involved at all in its development but it's the same heater tech in a very affordable and more portable package. I'm pretty sure most of you guys will love it!
