Well mothers are best from seed BUT if you're going to turn a mother into a clone then put your clones under stress and phenotype your plants. Choose the strongest, fastest, biggest plant from that batch of clones and keep it. We can't eliminate genetic drift BUT we can inhibit/control it. These are some vegging clones I have. Notice the difference from the smaller and bigger ones. And to the trolls ALL of them came off the same plant and ALL of them were pulled together. Cloning is a skill that I've definitely improved on but I wanna get better. Soil is not bad it just has three negatives that we growers rely on, 1: airatiom of medium, 2:it stays hot and is impossible to buffer without spending more money(unless you do super soil), and 3: to Dx a symptom or correct over/under watering is hard because it will stay wet until powder dry. Regardless of level I feel that soilless has huge advantages but if you wanna stay as organic and natural as possible then coco is the best sub for soil. Fox farms is amazing and I actually use the aqua forest to supplement my coco, I use cocoa,
fox farm aqua forest, then I throw in the rest of the supplements(based on my environment),
cal-mag, kelp, grow formula, and good for the micro bacteria. I'm huge on the whole carbon based feeding verse using nutes but I will still have my Gh on hand to correct deficiencies swiftly. Guess which ones I'll pull for flowering and cloning lol