It's been quite a while since my last update but
@Siege and
@Jayefc1 I did keep your suggestions in mind.
I'm happy to say that there has been good progress. I was able to battle the algae by increasing CO2, lowering light and increasing ferts. I think there is still some tuning to do but I have no more BBA and only get green dust algae on the glass relatively slowly.
I changed up plants as well adding in some hairgrass, rotala h'ra, rotala green, s.repens and Heteranthera Zosterifolia and bolbitis difformis.
The one plant that completely stunted was Rotala Macaranda -- one deformed stem survived and now has a very healthy shoot I am trying to propagate from to see if it will be successful going forward.
Plants were growing very, very well and the tank looked like this:
With some personal and work travel, I neglected it a little the last few weeks so last night it took 2/3 hours to hack everything back and clean it up. It will take some time to fill in again.
The RCS population has absolutely exploded -- there are probably 100+ in there now. Should I be concerned about their bioload?
My big disappointment so far have been the CRS shrimp. I put in two batches of 6 a month apart and I slowly saw fewer and fewer and think there are none left 5 months later. I only saw 2/3 dead ones in the actual aquarium.
Thanks for everyone's help.