Hello Slade, glad to hear you are making progress. Your seeing issues may also be attributed to your posture while you are welding. I try to position my head so that I am looking in from the end of my weld joint and progressing towards my head. Also, if you are using the gas lens type cup assembly you can possibly cheat the tungsten stick-out just a bit, in normal scenarios where a butt weld is being done, around a 1/4" stick-out will work fairly well, with the lens you can probably increase this to around 3/8". For fillet welds a bit more stick-out is generally tollerable due to the capture of the shielding gas by the parts being welded and up to 1/2" will often work well, here again you can fudge a bit and likely go to around 5/8" in some instances. Whatever you end up with in regard to stick-out, watch the bead color to insure you haven't gone too far. When that happens you will notice the end of the tungsten will blacken after welding has ceased and the color of the finished beads will start to go from the nice straw colors more towards the grays and dull color. Also, always remember to run enough post-flow on the shielding gas timer(this time should be long enough so that the tungsten will maintain it's shiney appearance once welding has ceased and will be longer as the size of the tungsten used increases) and hold the gas cup over the end of your bead until it has timed out. This will keep the end of the bead from turning black or gray and also help to capture and hold the post-flow gas on the end of the tungsten to keep it from burning up and oxidizing.
If you get a chance, use the search function on the forum here and check out some of the previous posts that are on here discussing GTAW shielding gas, gas lens, weld deposit colors, and some of the other topics that relate to just the sort of questions that you have asked. There are a bunch of highly skilled contributors here that have given tons of information that could possibly answer any questions you have or would like clarified. Lawrence is one of these gentlemen, Tommyjoking is another, ssbn727(Henry), another, Kix, I could go on and on. All of these folks and more are available to help you out. Stay tuned and ask away. Best regards, Allan