I’ve never had much success with retroratchet. It has lots of sharp edges in the way it is implemented, but beyond bugs there’s also the mental discontinuity you mentioned.
I’ve had more luck with the dashboard I built which displays weekly average rate vs the road dial’s rate. This lets me know if I am on a collision course and need to improve. If I’ve built up a big buffer, I can steepen the road to bleed off the buffer slowly – or maybe I’ll actually start doing more and the buffer won’t go away!