I am just like that! I'm the same way with cooking as I am with
vaping. I agree that fresh wicks taste funky for the first tankful (or two, sometimes) and I like the way SS tastes cleaner than Kanthal or Nichrome. It just does. To me though, cotton is cotton is cotton. Cotton balls, cotton bandage gauze, Zen Master grown organic cotton prayed over in Haiku... it all tastes funky until it's had a half dozen ml of liquid through it. Where on the Japanese islands is there even room to grow all this cotton? Organically? Are we being had? Because my old roll of bandage gauze is a good wicker.