Defoliating is as much art as it is technique. There's a balance you want to strike between air and light moving through the canopy and keeping as many leaves as you can while you do this. I like to keep my plants fairly sparse with leaves as I think air and light moving through them is worth sacrificing leaves but this run I let them fill out until day 20 of flip then I did a hard defoliation. I was worried I might get mold from so much wet leaf matter being so dense but once I cleared out the leaf material to my satisfaction, I realized that everything came out clean with no mold and the plants seemed to really like not being pruned constantly. I'm guessing that every time you prune you sort of shock and stunt them so you lose a little growth time before they bounce back.
Final trim back. It's hard to see from this angle but I can see the floor of the tent from the top looking down around most of the branches. This means plenty of light and air can circulate reducing any mold issues and giving the plants lots of photon exposure all the way down to the net level.
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