Your rolling terrain in Buffalo is very similar to Erie, so I think I understand where you are at. I also played around with my gearing quite a bit and I am still tweaking it as I gain strength much as you are talking about doing. When getting back into riding all our thoughts are about being able to have a low enough gear to be able to spin up the steepest hill we are faced with. At some point the light came on for me that sure I need that range but I also am only doing that a really small percentage of the total time on the bike and it’s not worth sacrificing everything else just for the tough climb. For me that is the beauty of the triple crank once I figured it’s like having two bikes in one if I got the gearing worked out right. I ride my bike like it was a double after all kinds of crank and ring changes I went back to what it came with for the middle and largest rings 42,52 that 10 tooth jump is an easy shift to make and the 42,52 combination allows for a pretty good half step pattern when I feel the need and that allows for a wider spaced cassette. I personally have a 12-36 (9 speed) and off the center 42 don’t think any of the steps shifting sequentially are that unpleasant. Maybe my tolerance for adjusting cadence slightly is the reason because I only really tweak into the half steps when I’m confronted with a long stretch where I don’t see myself shifting for a while and I need just a little more or less spin. Then it’s a single shift in the front and a double in the back. What I did with the granny then was just the opposite of what you are thinking and I took it to the absolute extreme I could for when I get a heavy load or into the mountains or both. I found out with the ramps and pins on the center ring I could (soft shift) up from a 24t granny to a 42t center without much effort and 6 of the 9 cogs on the cassette were usable gears and being wider spaced I didn’t need to jump up and down much between the granny and the center, and like you on rolling terrain after a hard climb just coast the down part getting some speed to start the next climb with. For me I lose more momentum on the “rollers” making the front shift up and back down than just staying on the granny and shifting a few on the cassette.

The center / center gear should be the starting point and then determine the width (closeness) of the cassette to suit your desire for a cadence range best for you. When you plug the numbers into a calculator program you find the big ring doesn’t buy you much maybe one or two higher gears is all and for a while I was wondering what I even needed it for. When I started seeing how the overlap could would fill in the gaps and that the double shifts were not that much trouble I started liking having all that range.

It depends so much on where you ride and when I took my bike on vacation down south where it was really flat I would have liked a nice tight spaced cassette with just a single ring in the front. I would say it’s hard for anyone to recommend gears but we can relate our process and others can adapt from that. Having watched a lot of people riding it seems that the higher speed spinners favor tighter spacing and shift more. The mashers seem to be fine with bigger steps and most of us are someplace in the middle.