Advice Needed - Stepper Speed / Gear Reduction

Everything I’m about to say about specs / speeds / things that sound factual, are based on experience and I could be 100% wrong. Please feel free to reply and tell me I’m wrong on any of this. It might point me in a better direction.

I’ve had about 20 automated blind tilting setups in my house for a few years and they have worked near flawlessly. Each setup is made of a 28BYJ stepper, DRV8825 driver, esp8266 d1 mini. My blinds take a lot of force to tilt, so I cannot hook the stepper directly to the hex turning rod at the top of the blinds. To get around this, I designed and printed some housings that place the stepper directly over the place where the hand turning rod would connect. The stepper turns the worm gear and tilts the blinds. My complaints with this setup are that it is ugly and it is loud. To fix the noise, I switched to TMC2208 drivers. To fix how ugly it is, I designed a small 4:1 planetary gearbox that I can mount the stepper motor to. The stepper / gearbox assembly couples directly with the hex rod at the top.

Now comes the problems. When I switched to TMC2208 drivers, everything runs slower. The fastest I can get everything to go is about 1/2 the speed of the DRV8825s. I’ve set the TMC2208 to 1/2 microstepping and I think that’s the fastest I can get that to go. The fastest speed I can set in the yaml is 800. Anything above that and it starts missing steps and the blinds position slowly falls out of alignment. When I switched to the planetary gearbox, the speed issue got better, but there isn’t enough torque. The blinds cannot close as tightly without backdriving the stepper when the power is cut. I can increase the gear ratio, but then everything gets slower again.

Questions:
-When I set the speed above 800 in the yaml, the stepper misses steps. Is this because 28BYJ’s are slow or is that the fastest a D1 mini can provide, or is this the fastest esphome can drive them?
-Is anyone aware of a tutorial to use a servo instead with some kind of hull effect sensor or rotary encoder to determine position? I’m stuck using steppers because I don’t know of any other way to determine position other than mechanical limit switches (which I really don’t want to use).

Thanks!

EDIT: I found an old NEMA8 stepper. It spins faster, but there is no internal gear reduction, so I guess thats to be expected.