Kudos on being honest with yourself. I wish we did less back patting after good events and more introspection after “bad” events locally. But we don’t want to offend anyone.
Related to Scooter’s comment below, that’s why the big mesoscale snow band type paper uses layer averaged 700-500 mb f-gen. That will account for the slant of the system into the cold air.
This band was right in the middle of that layer max on 12z guidance. Bad news is that layer is not often available on free websites, or even many paid sites.