I try to keep an open mind to new techniques(but I still don't like led

). In my current tank I have moved away from my old school methodology heavy in + heavy out. I have reduced the amount of water changes to about 30% monthly. I still feed heavy, very heavy stocked with fish, but I rely on skimming and bacteria to keep my system clean. I feed 6 cubes of mysis daily, sometimes a comparable amount of LRS reef foods, along with flakes and pellets. So that's over 100 cubes of mysis monthly + all the other foods in a system of about 130gallons. My 36 gallon (2 18g changes) monthly water change cannot remove all this waste.
If you allow your system to mature biologically, and constantly challenge the bioload, your tank will process an unbelievable amount of waste. I've seen this many times in older established tanks, and now I see it in my tank that is a little less than a year old. The problem is while the tank is "maturing" you might get things like cyano, or diatom, and most reefers freak out doing larger water changes, gfo, carbon?. whatever. Allowing the system to deal with it naturally, producing enough beneficial bacteria, seems to be the long term fix. Once this is achieved color health and colors can be pretty amazing.
A couple very experienced reefers that i spoke to go 6-8 months with no water changes. Their corals seem to be very happy, and their SPS colors are excellent. I don't believe they dose trace elements or anything as complicated as triton, which opens my mind to the possibility that many of these trace minerals that we would be testing for have little impact on coral health? I'm not sure about this but it's just a suspicion that I will keep in mind as I learn more about the Triton method.
FWIW, in my current balance, I do see a small growth spurt in my SPS each time I do a water change. Not sure why but it happens every time.