Oh, yeah, I forgot about the aero-cloner I played around with!
That’s almost certainly due to low-quality, poorly preserved weed in your area at the time. When I was younger, you could tell that the weed we were smoking started to be less potent and tasty as the summer wore on. By September, about half of what you bought was likely to give you a headache. I generally attributed this to the suppliers getting to the end of their inventory from the last harvest, which had been getting hot all summer in whatever non climate-controlled building they were using. By mid-October, the earliest harvests were coming in, and by November pretty much any weed you bought was good again.
And yeah, perfecting a pure hydroponic or aero grow is purely about the speed of growth of the plant, not about the quality of the end product. As long as you start with the same genes and take care of the plants, it’ll be the same potency. To provide a legal analog, hydroponic tomatoes don’t taste any better, they just grow faster in a smaller space.
It is, however, still illegal under federal law.
If TV has taught me anything it’s that you’ve gone nose blind.