The flavor us starting to come in now. It is just frustrating reading the threads by all the perfect building people.
I actually don't know if I handle the wick too much before loading. I do wash before touching. Maybe I need one of those rubber cabinet liners I see people using to roll it. That is really my biggest issue. My hands are too slippery. Do you you all use those to help roll the wick?
I don't use anything to assist in rolling the cotton, I just do it very very lightly by hand. As a matter of fact, most times what I do is kind of pat it into shape rather than roll it for a couple of reasons, it helps me notice if there's any inconsistency in the wick (lumps, etc), and also I find it's really easy to roll the cotton too tight, which can cause a decrease in the wicking ability. You want it to be as fluffy as possible in the coil, but not packed in there.
Anyway, what gauge wire and wattage are you running? I did run into a problem once where I was building too much of a coil for my mod. What I mean is, if you use too big of a wire to make that 1.2 ohm coil, and don't have enough wattage to make it fire in the desired heat flux range, it will result in a cooler hit, which sometimes will be muted in flavor. An example is the staggered Clapton coil I did a few days ago. It worked and would fire, but the ramp time was long because of the amount of wire it had to heat, even at my mod's maximum (60w).. The hits had some flavor, but were cool/muted until the coil heated, which by that time I had a lung full of cold and muted vapor... Get where I'm going?
This may not be the case for you, but I would assume that this could result in a longer break-in time on the coil/wick since the heat is less and the ramp up is long... or maybe not. Just throwing it out there.