Thank you for sharing! There is a test kit sold that measures ammonia and ammonium separately so you can see whether a tank has the more harmful kind or the less harmful kind. I may just have to pick one of those up to help me decide better what to do.
As it stands, because the tanks never seem to fully cycle for me below ph 6, I have been doing the large regular water changes approach. Usually I change 150-200% of the water every week which seems like a lot when it is all being prepped several days in advance in 5 gallon buckets. I usually have 8 of these 5 gallon buckets with water in it at various stages of soaking with peat.
Now, at 6.4 pH, the tanks do cycle which is what the Betta imbellis are at now.
I do agree that it is quite the controversial topic. But, I think we can probably share differing opinions on here without it causing too much issue. Obviously your fish are doing well, spawning, young are hatching and then growing up; certainly wouldn’t be the case if what you were doing wasn’t right for your fish. I hope more on here will share their methods or even what their test results are in their low ph tanks. I don’t think you can compare them to regular tanks and apply the same method, but I may be wrong.