If you ask me a couple of months ago.. I would say ADA soil not worth the money.. but I must say ada soil makes things easier. Back in the day I was scrimping with holland sand+pea gravel+loam clay+quartz chips my glosso really quite sad coz tortured by whiptails, somemore plants easily injured by whiptail catfish rasping at it.. coz my substrate quite compact and hard, not like ADA.. kinda cushion. But in my old ADA-less tank, grow echinodrus easy peas la.. E.osiris grow 6 foot tall. Growing any fine leaf foreground plant different story. Buy HC for 25 bucks and see it float around the next day. Plant back, next day float again. Those that stick on the substrate try to root here and there, then whiptail whack... fly dunno where again. Not as easy to root as ADA la and things tend to stick inside and not come out so easily. Easier to plant without damaging the roots.

My tank with ADA soil, I put the whiptail inside, glosso spreading everywhere no problem. I also experimented. Some place I put ADA soil some I put normal holland sand... the glosso only spreading on ADA soil.. not yet spread to holland sand part. I stuck a couple of half dead plants in ada soil.. it starts budding from the bottom brightly coloured somemore. Wah really miracle stuff. If stick in the same plant in my old set up, can expect to see "kiam chai" after a few days. I think the main thing about ADA soil is it's light.. somemore it's porous. Plants damn easy to root and shoot from underground. Holland sand will become compact and hard. Unless you put some malaysian trumpet snail and let it burrow a bit and loosen your soil .

I don't really have algae problems apart froms staghorn in my ada tank. By the way ari, today I did a major cleanup of the algae.. manually removed all the algae I can find.. backbreaking work... change water 50% after cleanup two days in a row. Now can see just a little bit left... dunno if it'll come back onot. I also tried your ocean free algae remover with the algae. Works also ah I think. The algae change colour from greyish green to light green. Somemore the algae seem to thin out..I think gonna die liaw. But I don't dare to dose my whole tank la.. got shrimps.