Welcome @
Travs,
While not wishing to throw a spanner in your works. When I started 3 months ago now, I was vaping fruit flavours to start with. When I did finally try a tobacco flavor, all it did was make me want to puke.
As for throat hit. I use 12mg pina colada first off, with and ego/ce5 setup, with the coil redone at 1.4 ohms.
I was a 20+ rollie type, and started out on 18mg. Found it a weak at the start but soon adjusted, now its 10-18mg, if I know i'm gonna be vaping hard I come down to the lower level stuff, so as to delay the I've had to many smokes headache.