more is not always better. 
more is not always better.
Gather around and prepare for a chuckle.
The I3 2020 I bought from Hearless has been a good machine, A bit temperamental at times but it really does good work. Most of the time. When it wants to. Silly machine.
Seriously though we bought it to jumpstart our business after a setback, and now it does duty as a prototype/test machine. Along the way it developed a habit of skipping and stalling during extrude.
Initially I thought it was a thermal stability issue at high temps so I replace the thermistor with a TC. Started printing well again, then after some mods it started misbehaving again.
So I turned up the V-ref on the E-drive. Slight improvement. Gave it more power.
The board it shipped with eventually died (as all good things do), so I replaced it, and flashed the firmware back to it... and the skipping came back.
A helpful member suggested some tuning, more E-steps, more acceleration, more power.
It got worse and worse, so I replaced the motor. And the driver. And the board again... and this problem would NOT GO AWAY.
I reached out to Heartless, she was stumped. Calls to Folgertech basically resulted in "If you ordered an FT-5 press one, all other callers can hang up and--" Well not quite but they had very little to say.
Reached out to Heartless again. She suggested turning down a certain setting in the firmware...
And what in the name of all that isn't bacon it worked.
So I lowered another setting.
And another.
To the point where I had massive underextrusion and from there I've gradually dialed it back in.
Go ahead and laugh... I was following the advice of those who came before me. And it seemed intuitive -- stalling = more power/more steps. Turns out we were overfeeding to the point the machine was going "LISTEN, HUMAN I CAN'T CHEW ALL THIS STOP OMG."
Long story short... well sometimes even us "experts" have our moments. Hopefully by sharing this I can prevent someone else from going down the same path.