I’m honestly having great difficulty following the point you are trying to make. Your post #174 suggested leaving the mass of the capsules in their operational position and extending the tethers out further with “spin-up rockets at the end of the tethers”, which doesn’t amplify the impulse provided. You now seem to be suggesting to extend the capsules out to the end of the tethers to some distance, applying some arbitrarily small amount of impulse, and then using the work imparted by pulling the masses inward against the centrifugal force to do additional work to achieve the desired rotational momentum and rotational energy. While this is conceptually possible, it would actually require making these tethers many, many, many times the length of their operational configure in order to amplify the impulse obtained from “a tiny amount of propellant” into sufficient angular momentum to generate a significant amount of centrifugal force, and any tether made of a real material is going to have some mass per unit length that will contribute substantially to the overall mass of the vehicle if they are really long.
And this is still notwithstanding all of the dynamics that such a system would have due to the elasticity of a real cable and the modal dynamics of the system that are induced every time there is some kind of change to mass properties or impulse. There are a large number of issues using some kind of tethered system that are not perfectly balanced rigid bodies that make this impractical for generating ‘artificial gravity’ for a crewed vehicle.
Stranger