Hi, coldrampage, thanks for your input! It was useful for sure.
I've taken the liberty of sobering up from Christmas and doing some experimentation with the section (S) flags in EoF and how they interact in Rocksmith. I'll write that below the response to your message.
Adding the "No Guitar" sections is something that, after my experimentation, I'll probably avoid almost always, and in the same vein, avoid the RS suggestions. (does anybody use them?) It's due to the results of my experiment, you'll see why I forgot while writing the post.
Rocksmith recommending exactly one section, that's true. Tested that myself. I don't know why I thought otherwise, either that was just an assumption I had, or I spend too much time in RR, where I usually repeat multiple sections at a time.
Multiple phrases per one section: it behaves like you would expect it to: the section swimlane (orange line) connects all of those phrases, which are separated by where you put each phrase, but, depending on how you name the phrases, they won't all change DD difficulty when you change one or have the same DD max level. Unless, of course, you name them all the same.
Subsections: indeed, they, unfortunately, don't exist. That would probably be the (easy) solution to the problem I have.
Regarding time signature: (and key signature, too, while we're at it) I haven't touched it at all. Any idea if it also does something in RS, or if it's just useful for EoF and you, the person, when you're creating a song? I can see the visual effect it has in EoF, but I have no music education, so to me it doesn't really help that much. I'm not educated enough in music theory to find it useful, even if it is. I just count the "position" numbers and go by those.
Shift+P sections: I've never tried them so far, mostly because of my phrase names are pretty much variable names, (intro_long, pre_chorus_1, etc.) and also because, if you make a section that way, it has strict naming rules. (try naming a section 'asdf') It basically limits you to what you can see in Shift+S, so I prefer to make sections in Shift+S and phrases in Shift+P. That way I find it easier to then manage them in the "Beat > Events > All events" menu, with the "RS sections" and "Sections (RS phrases)" filters.
And about the song Loudness factor working in reverse: that's also true, but counter-intuitive. The UI pop-up says "Softer 0, -1, -2 ... Default -7 ... -18, -19, -20 Louder," which implies that the closer you are to 0, the quieter the song should be. Hopefully that'll be fixed or explained why it's written that way. I say this because the tones say pretty much the same thing (0 = quiet, -20 = loud) but, I tested it there, and there it actually works the way it's described.
Experiment Basically, what I did is, I took the original, modified the section (S) markers and guesstimated what the result would do, generated it, opened RS and looked at the orange swimlanes. Each column is a revision, (version, if you prefer that name) and the rows represent sections of the song, and what EoF section (if any) I put there. I made 101-104 first, then I just looked at the prev. revision's results and did what I thought could get me closer to my goal. I was too "in the zone" to comment why I changed what I did and with what intention/expectation, so the results will be pretty much visual-only. Whoops.
I marked with orange and "no color" backgrounds where the sections are separated in the RS UI. The first column, Goal, is how it should look like. The very light colors in A16 and A20 mean I don't care what color they are, as long as they share that color between themselves. Second column, P, is phrase names, which are meaningless here, but whatever. Third column, S, is the version I had when I started this post. No point in coloring it, it's already obvious from my post's screenshot what that looks like.
Conclusion What I can say about the topic of "what I learned from this:" my best guess is that RS wants the whole song to be one swimlane, and for each section to appear exactly once.
For example, at the start, non-identical sections are merged. (101: in, 127: (rv)nv, 112: icvn) Wherever the same section doesn't appear twice, the swimlane line (same background color in the table/image) continues. 107-111 have ii, so they all get separated. But, in all revisions, the second chorus doesn't get merged with the outro. That's because that's the second chorus trying to merge with the first outro, which is illegal, because reasons?
If you look at 112 or 113, they have different sections until Column 21, so they all get morphed into a Introchorusnoguitarverse Frankenstein. And then the second chorus doesn't get merged with the prev. swimlane, because it already has a chorus, and the second chorus doesn't get merged with the outro, because it's not the second outro.
I tested this out in 128, which isn't in the pic because I'm severely running out of steam here, but I'm not writing a thesis, so that's my excuse for not being thorough being lazy. You'll have to take my word for it. For 128, I split the song up like this: icvovco. In Rocksmith, icvo appears as one swimlane, cvo as another/the second. (icvo)(cvo). I'll bet money if I put an Intro after the first outro, it would be merged with the second swimlane. So, the second outro got merged because it was being merged with the second chorus and verse.
I was gonna say something about not using No Guitar, but I forgot while writing this. Hopefully someone finds this half as interesting or useful as I did testing it. The more I'm writing this, the more scatterbrained I get, so I'll end my comment here.
