Sarah Chen

Totally normal to feel that way your first few times, dont sweat it. The timing thing gets easier — most people wait about a second after the squelch tail drops before keying up, just enough to make sure the other person is really done. doubling happens to everyone, even guys who've been doing this for decades, especially on busy repeaters.
For phonetics it kind of depends on the net. Some nets are pretty casual and a quick callsign is fine, others are more formal and they expect full phonetics every time. just follow what the net control does and you'll fit right in. and yeah for announcements you usually just key up when they ask and say something like "W1XYZ, I have an announcement" and wait for them to acknowledge you before you go ahead. you'll get the hang of it fast, the first few check-ins are always the weirdest part

yeah the 60m power dropoff thing is a known annoyance, some guys just run reduced power on that band and call it a day but if youre doing board work anyway makes sense to address it. i did the TX mod on mine like two years ago and it's been fine. never touched the roofing filter though, honestly my ears arent good enough anymore to care about that level of adjacent rejection haha. getting old is rough on the hobby in ways nobody warns you about.

psk31 is still my go to for conversational stuff tbh, old school but the waterfall full of signals on 14.070 feels more alive to me than waiting for js8 replies. that said i havent put serious time into js8call so maybe im missing something. ft4 is worth trying too if you want something faster than ft8 but dont need the absolute floor sensitivity, activity picked up a lot during contests