I don't use twitter anymore.
Seems like my dms here were set to only followers by mistake so I fixed that.

Actually IIRC constant buffer can be pretty slow when doing non uniform access on it. So maybe thats it?

That is very surprising to me. When doing hlsl with fxc the non const version would be pathological slow since it compiles it as pushing all values into indexable registers just to read the one value out.
While const version just gets put into immediate constant buffer.

I had something similar in my repo for a while. Completely jumbled up release order. However it was the correct order when I looked at the list with an incognito window which is really weird.

Man you project is cooked or something. I've never experienced or heard of anyone else having those two issues before.
Especially the play mode one. I don't think I ever upload without going into play mode beforehand to test.

You basically use the samplers and tex2dlod anytime that is defined and texture2d and .Load whenever it isn't defined

blegh, personally I would simply not support surface shaders. But if you really want it you can do it by hiding it from the surface analysis thingy with quite a bit of macro spam by checking SHADER_TARGET_SURFACE_ANALYSIS

I took a quick look at it. You used 3 sampler2D in a linear nx1 way. Using just texture objects and .Load would probably be better. 3 samplers add to registers which means you might get knocked down in occupancy while just doing textures would not. Also 2D textures might not like a nx1 layout at all