Hey thanks--I was fairly sure this was the ROM in question. Thank you for providing this! I was hesitant to flash because I'm always a little skeptical about the amount of help I'll get should I get stuck. I'm not exactly a noob at this, but I have plenty to learn. It looks like you've done a lot of work to provide a positive experience, so I'll give it a shot and see how it goes. I promise to read and re-read the instructions on the first 3 posts, and to NOT bother you with questions that have already been addressed in the thread.

. Thanks!!
if you made it through dirty santa the rest should be cake. 99% of the issues i covered for people were
after going to AOSP and not having a backup of their programing info in their efs and having to find a way to
manually go in and fix each fd up piece.
The other is being on older software and downloading a OTA and rebooting with it in your internal storage.
This one causes a endless boot loop into twrp, so be advised to delete the update if your on older software or be prepared to
hit my post # 3 for fixes and be near a pc as you need to fastboot erase the fota and misc directories to resolve the boot loop. A twrp wipe will not fix it and restores etc wont either lol.
Otherwise theres now a lil over 100 pages of chatting and troubleshooting, fixes and things that have gone on, and mostly its all outdated as ive provided the fixes for 99% of everything in the latest version 7.5
Just be prepared to take 15-20 minutes for the phone to boot up the 1st time. My rom is deodexed, and the 1st boot is doing 298 things before you get to the optimization part. There is not boot animations as the phone will always have the static screen issue on reboots so i went ahead a placed a disabled command there to just save time/batt life. The setup wizard is stripped and only there to give you the notice its done booting and time to get to playing around.
Magisk is kinda finicy being its systemless design. It takes some time to get used to it, and be aware that some older apps that dont support exotic root or systemless root may not request root and not fully work. Titanium backup is one i know is getting attacked by googles app scanning and needs to have that turned off before it will work, most of my apps have a option to set "force root" so it asks for a root request regardless if it understands MagiskSu's root methods.
just some food for thought. Hope everything goes well, and there is a ton of people on the forum here that have great knowlege and can help with troubleshooting issues you may have