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I can't comment on Ekos and it's guiding performance, but if you switch to PHD2, the guiding assistant is a quite useful tool. I run it once on most nights. What that does is disable guide output and monitor the star position to nail down the seeing related movement of the star to recommend the minimum move settings, then unless you untick the box it measures the Dec backlash and calculates a suggested backlash compensation amount. It takes about 5 minutes and I have found it handy to dial it in to decent starting settings fairly quickly. Depending on the focal length of the imaging scope, I have generally found less active guiding to be better than more. IMO, if the guiding RMS is markedly less than your pixel scale all you are likely to achieve by trying to tighten up the guiding with more aggressive corrections is blobby stars as you chase the seeing.
The RMS is really what matters if everything is functioning OK. Unless you have spikes in the tracking errors (Indicating a probable mount issue) or unless the bigger deviations are greater than your pixel scale or are common (In which case the RMS will suffer as well) I reckon the most likely thing is to go down a rabbit hole chasing what turns out to be seeing effects. It is why guiding can be superb one night and awful looking the next. That is what happened to me last month. One night I had a guiding graph that looked like my mates typical Tak mount graph (i.E. a "He's dead Jim" ECG plot) and the following night it was nothing like as good. I did not even physically touch the setup between nights, the only thing that changed was the sky.
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