Hi, good to hear things are moving in the right direction.
Plants love co2, by reducing your huge lighting intensity, you reduced the huge demand for co2. By improving your distribution you have improved co2 availability to the plants, these two combined result in a win win situation 🙂
Getting enough co2 down to the substrate where co2 hungry plants like hc and glosso live is key to their success, the light just dictates how fast they try and grow and subsequently how much co2 you have to feed them.
Cheerio,
Ady.