Ah, macro generation time vs generated-macro-expansion time :)
I do use debug prints, but they actually seem ineffective for debugging macros. I'm not sure why. Hence the commented-out variants.
"I just realized that making a helper macro to remove a layer of quasiquotes is a bit futile.."
Yeah, I'm not sure either. Perhaps it's not the number of quasiquotes but something else about them. Perhaps there's easy and hard doubled-backticks.