I hit 300 frames on M42 and the histogram finally made sense

Last week I stacked my 300th frame of the Orion Nebula from my backyard in Phoenix and something clicked that I didn't expect. I'd been fighting gradients and weird color casts for about 4 months, always blaming light pollution or my flats, and I kept adding frames without actually checking the histogram in real time. At around 180 frames I noticed my subs were clipping the highlights on the trapezium and I was losing core detail without realizing it. Once I started watching the histogram per sub instead of just stacking everything, my keeper rate jumped from maybe 60 percent to 85 percent, and the final image actually showed the dust lanes clearly for the first time. The weird part is that 300 wasn't a magic number for signal to noise, it was the point where I finally had enough bad frames in the stack to see the pattern and stop repeating the same mistake. I'm going to reshoot with shorter exposures next month and see if that helps the core even more. Has anyone else hit a frame count that made them rethink their whole capture routine?