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With the body shape of your design the weight placement makes complete sense to me. The shape of the bait makes a huge difference regarding how weight needs to be distributed

I have made lots(majority of the ones I make have soft tails)of jerk bait/gliders with a soft tail. The tail has a large impact on the action. The wider the tail the more it works like a keel robbing the action. I use almost exclusively long thin tails because of this. Even the thin tail robs a fair bit of the action Mine are all resin pours and I use a combination of pure resin/bird shot for balancing the lure. I find a highly buoyant top section combined with a pure resin belly with bird shot center or front third works well It takes a few pours to get things just right on new designs. I find when test swimming without a tail with a glide style I want the bait to be able to almost turn on the twitch. This way when I add tail it tames the action just enough I imagine the lexan or wooden tails would have a similar effect to a wide grub tail so you will have to overcome the drag from it I don’t know if this will help you or not but this is what I have figured out that and works for me

Yep, Warmer and more humidity... A box with an incandescent light bulb will do the trick. You don't need to heat the whole area.

I have made a lot of baits with bills, different sizes and angles and have yet to come up with any consistent pattern. I have two baits similar in size with the same angle and one dives deeper than the other. I did learn that size doesn’t dictate depth, angle is more important. Size can cause greater turbulence. This bait below look odd because the the large lip, but you can barley turn the handle and it starts moving side to side.

I have actually just drawn up plans for a flat sided lure. But it is only 40mm long. Let me know if it is any use to you. Yes, there are nearly always going to be problems. When making a new bait, you have to assume that it may take a few prototypes to get to what you want. When you build up experience with building a lot of lures, you can cut down this work and occasionally get it right first time. But to get the most out of a particular body shape does take a few trials, lip sizes, tow eye positions, ballast locations. Dave