A few days ago I finally had some free time to rewire the strain gauges and remove the splitter phone plug connections; I ended up simply stripping the wires and soldering them together using heat-shrink solder connectors. This meant I went from 5 phone plugs to just the single one on the PCB. I figured it would improve things, but only somewhat and that I would still need to ultimately either solder the wires to my board (or in a future PCB design, use screw terminals). Surprisingly, the readings immediately fell in line with what I would expect based on my previous calibrations (obviously I can't truly calibrate things, because there's an active beehive on the scale now). Even better, I played around with the phone plug and didn't get any wild changes in readings like I had previously with the other connections. It currently shows ~15lbs of bees, comb, honey, etc. which seems reasonable and when I added a known weight it increased by this amount. In the days since, it's also stayed relatively consistent; while there is a fair bit of noise in the data over time, I've found that if I use a healthy average it stays quite consistent too (found a 12 hour average works well, but am now trying smaller averages to see how low I can go). Time will tell if it continues to work well; I'm still planning to begin designing and testing a new scale for any future hives (and possibly for this one if my existing scale appears to fail again) using bathroom scale-style strain gauges I already have.