Actually I try to not mess with the Fine Tuning -> Gains Control at all, for the exact reason that you mentioned, it’s like pure experimentation / wild shots in the dark. Maybe a couple of times is OK. But several times is exhausting and you can find yourself running in circles. I didn’t learn this from experience through wild goose chases. I just intuitively told myself to stay away from that can of worms.
Because I self program, I forgo the luxury of being able to have REM done, which is OK by me. So I rely on the in-situ audiometry feature to re-measure my threshold hearings using the actual hearing aids I wear which should be more accurate than the initial one done in the booth by the HCP. So I re-prescribe the gains from my in-situ audiometry result to be more accurate. By the way, you can also compare side by side your original audiogram vs the in-situ result to see how far off you are.
Anyway, the reason I mention the in-situ re-prescription is that instead of making the Gain Controls adjustments in the Fine Tuning section which is exhausting and can be futile at times unless it’s just a minor tweak or two with good results, I use my in-situ data to adjust instead and let Genie 2 re-prescribe. For example, if I feel like I need to boost some lows, instead of tweaking the several handles in Fine Tuning -> Gain Controls, I just increase the threshold values in my in-situ result at the frequency(ies) I want a notch or so, then let Genie 2 re-prescribe. That way, the small adjustment I make via the in-situ manifests itself through the re-prescription to all aspects of the Gain Controls in Fine Tuning, from Soft to Medium to Loud areas altogether at once.
Same with going the reverse, I reduce the threshold in in-situ to reduce the gain through re-prescription.
Below is a screenshot of my in-situ page. As you can see, I decided to give up on amplifying from 4 KHz and up because all I hear are the buzzing mechanical sounds of the receivers, so I decide to not amplify them at all, and just use frequency lowering to hear sounds in those ranges. So in the in-situ audiogram, I just lower the thresholds for those 3 data points at 4, 6 and 8 KHz to the lowest values allowed. As a result, you can see on my gain curves on the second screenshot that I no longer have amplification in that range (the gray vertical source bands), but instead, frequency lowering moves the sounds in that gray band down to the red/blue destination bands for me instead.
You can also see that my original audiogram shows lower thresholds in the lower frequency range up to 500 or 1 KHz. But in-situ says that I need higher thresholds in that low area for both ears, so that’s how I’d make the change in my Gain Controls to automatically happen, via the gain re-prescription based on the in-situ data.
