Man, our block tried the same thing two summers ago and the weigh-in was eye opening. What actually stuck was setting up a shared compost bin three houses down so people didn't have to buy their own bags and forget about them. The numbers dropped for real once it was easy, not just a one week thing.

Your alignment being off a few degrees is exactly the problem, not the tracker.

Four hours is wild, how do you not notice that popup sitting there the whole time? That warning is basically the app begging you to save before it all goes up in smoke. Set your scratch disk to a drive with space and turn on auto save so this never happens again.