> For operational context, I am running all seven frame mediums. 

I run  "all mediums" (except for the dedicated comb honey supers), with 10-frame brood boxes and 9-frame extracted honey supers.
I've not had much success in convincing anyone that standardized components mean cost savings.

3 mediums equals two deeps, so getting the bees going with early feeding permits them to be raising brood all 3 mediums.
For comb honey, I compress the colony into two of the mediums when adding the comb supers, removing frames with no brood, and shuffling the brood frames into some semblance of cohesion.

There is enough mysticism around the variations on the themes of "making comb honey" and "making splits to avoid swarming" to start several religious cults, and both tend to happen at about the same time in spring.
Richard Taylor wrote a dozen or more books on the subject, and since his passing, there hasn’t been a new comb honey evangelist to emerge.

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