I hope it helped making nutrients ready. I didn't do a side by side but added microbes to tea with a good food source ( alfalfa, kelp meal) I'm sure had a nice community of microbes.
Growing my first auto was a pleasure with fast buds genetics. I learned a lot and now have some of my questions answered but with that I have new questions. Luckily I grabbed the buy one get one so I have another five seeds to answer some of those questions. The pot size still seems to apply with the living soil on photos the bigger the better. However it does seem possible to have a bunch of small pots and still have a nice harvest if you have seeds galore but I don't and I have a plant count keeping me from that approach. My next run I'll run 3 with all in 30 gal pots. I think with autos it's extremely important not to stress them early, they grow so fast it was pretty detrimental for my one plant. I underwatered them when I got to busy and ignored them until it was too late. One of the others also died early on and I replaced it with another seed however I believe the light was too intense,since I had already turned the light to almost full power for the other plants, the plant seemed like it was stunted and just flowered almost immediately because it too was underwatered and it was in a 5 gal so soil was even more dried out. I think living soils need to already be at a high nutrient cycling status so nutrients are ready for plants which I'll try to do a better job inoculating my next run. Few fan leaves and a easy job to trim.