> What an impressive and thorough deep dive.

Thanks!

> Have any of you ever gotten lost tweaking fade functions to get that perfect wave-like look?

You cannot use anything for the fade function, because you likely want the derivative (and potentially the second derivative) to be 0. See https://gist.github.com/KdotJPG/417d62708c76d53972f006cb906f... for making different ones. I personally never tried anything else than the hermite and the quintic.