Same thing happened to me with my own furnace. Ignored the short cycling all winter because I was busy fixing everyone else's heat. Woke up one January morning to a cold house and a cracked heat exchanger. Took me three hours on a Sunday to swap it when I could have just cleaned the flame sensor back in November for free. The shoemaker's kids go barefoot and all that. Mechanics always drive the worst cars, plumbers have the leakiest pipes, and we're all too dumb to look at our own stuff.

How did you track the footage for each pour, like did you just go off the invoice numbers or keep a separate log? I'm asking because if you can tie that 500k number back to which jobs had callbacks, you could probably figure out your real cost per square foot on the colored stuff, and that would give you hard numbers to back up a higher bid instead of just going off what the market will bear. That's the part most guys miss, they know they do good work but they can't prove which work pays and which work eats them alive in repairs. Your 3/8 inch rake thing cutting patches by a third is exactly the kind of proof I mean, because if that held up across a few hundred thousand feet then it's not a fluke, it's a pattern, and patterns are what you take to the bank when you're setting prices.