Well… I did it!!!
Only took 4 months to learn this new system and drill it down to under one minute! Even beat my old best time from standard Shadow by one second. 
So this system is absolutely viable!
Some final thoughts:
I loved knowing that I could construct simple consistent scenes with 2 elements per scene and just make the first affect the second somehow.
I loved knowing I’d use exactly 13 loci every time. I could drill those palace routes and learn them well and know that I’d have a scene at every spot.
I have hundreds of weak or meh images in this system, but it was ok because the others are strong and good. But I want a system where all or nearly all of them are strong and easy to pronounce quickly.
The more I explore my new Eclipse System phonetics and how simple they are, the more annoyed I am at Shadow’s and by extension this system’s handling of picture card pairs, especially those picture-second S-blends. They are huge time suckers!
I’m going to turn my attention now to learning and using the Eclipse system and getting that down under one minute as well. Hope to have that accomplished by year’s end. This will be a bit more challenging than this effort of going from standard Shadow to expanded P/O Shadow because of the new reading and phonetic rules, but I’m up for it.
Maybe some day down the road, I’ll expand that too to make it a full P/O, or play with a truly unique 2704 system like Ben where every pair has unique phonetics, but for now I’ve put a bow on this one.
On to Eclipse!
