Eh, after playing with the new balance some more I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s just no point to most focus raising activities any more - they take far too long for a very short period of minor benefit now.
You do want some permanent morale bonuses (optimist, stylish maybe, bookwork, constant music) because that will help put a floor under your focus for some slower burn activities such as book learning. But its no longer worth it to actually bump focus for anything but combat, and even then only in the very early low-skill stages of the game where you can expect to get the crap kicked out of you by basic zeds, so you need to make the gains from every swing count - at this phase your injuries will limit your training far more than focus loss.
In most other circumstances, temporary morale/focus gain activities can’t remotely keep up from the focus burn from most skill developing activities. Your real ‘base’ focus in this system hovers around 20-30 depending on what kind of stuff you’re doing, and getting up above 50 is an extravagant waste of time.
Unfortunately the UI doesn’t reflect this new reality yet and still represents lower focus as a penalty, which is overtly misleading to anyone trying to learn how it works now - its more like the WoW rest XP bar where if you haven’t done any skill gain for a while, you get a short burst of increased gain before dropping down to the standard slow rate - but unlike WoW its functionally coached in entirely negative (penalty) terms.
