Neither of those things are helping you learn. That sounds like “rote” or “brute-force” memorization, which is rarely efficient or effective in the long term.
You can use multiple learning and/or relearning steps – neither is inherently bad. There are reasons we steer beginners away from that as a starting point. There are more ways to get multiple steps wrong than get them right. And if you’re using multiple steps for ineffective/brute-force methods, then it’s really a waste of your time to add them.
A thousand or thousands – the more the better, the more varied the better. The way you originally presented yourself was as someone who had a significant amount of Anki experience/history. But now it sounds like that might have been us mistaking your messages.
Yep. It’s at the foundation of the development of spaced-repetition, going back to Leitner and Ebbinghaus. See Background - Anki Manual and How To Remember Anything Forever-ish .
I don’t think you’ve shown us anything yet that demonstrates you have actual problems in your review history. You might think you do, but is that accurate? If you want us to comment on that, you’d need to show us your data –
- What FSRS parameters do you get when you optimize on your actual data? How many reviews does it count in that preset?
- What is your Desired Retention (DR)? How does it compare to your retention outcomes?
- How does the rest of your Stats look – Answer Buttons, Card Counts, Intervals, Stability?
FSRS cannot deal with “up”-grading cards – using Hard when you got the answer wrong and should have used Again. But grading your cards too harshly just means things will grow more slowly for now. During optimization FSRS prioritizes more recent review history, so if a bad habit is mild or short-lived, it usually doesn’t take much to get past it. [But no, using an ignore-cards-reviewed-before date is a drastic solution that you shouldn’t resort to unless there is something really wrong.]