Listen to the boys about your light. I am new to LEDs so I cannot advise with confidence, but I can tell you I made the same mistake, and my plants looked a bit like yours after.
Being hydrophobic is okay, you just need to water slowly. My top soil is also hydrophobic for about 15 seconds when I water it because I do wet-to-dry cycles like the big boys here advised me to. Find out how much water you can pour into their pots at once WITHOUT the water spilling over the sides, but also getting close TO the sides. Lets say it is half a litre. Give each plant half a litre, then let it soak in for 15 minutes, rinse repeat until soil is saturated. 15 minutes gives the water on top time to make the soil below less hydrophobic.
I can only speak from my limited experience with soil: It is wet-to-dry cycle for me. My plants punished me every time I tried to follow Product advice about daily watering or every other day watering. All the experts here say the same thing, wet-to-dry cycles. A number of them corrected me in my own thread, telling me what I was doing was starving my roots of oxygen, so they drooped slightly.
As for the distilled water, I cannot give advice on that because I do not use it. My water only has chlorine in it no chloramine, so I can bubble it out in less than 24 hours.