I'm pretty much there - thanks for your patience on this. Seems like a satisfyingly complex system where you'd need a good few games with them to get tactically savvy on where and when you distribute your spore cards, key to which is getting them all back in deck, hence the skip to evening counterbalance.
So just to 100% get it, you're shuffling the entire shared discard pile back into the existing deck, not just the spore cards that have been discarded?