I've found it helpful to have multiple counters, but it's a personal choice. Whatever is most helpful for your recovery.
That's me lately, lol...! I prefer a straight count, but it's not an accurate depiction and perhaps black-and-white thinking to reset to 0 for one area (say MO) and neglect that you're not doing too bad for P, PMO.
Counting is definitely important though I am finding using my spreadsheet model as the primary accountability tool with a secondary counter accompanying it more useful & constructive personally. I feel counters on their own, without anything else don't give an accurate picture of progress and can in many cases be discouraging and lead to that unhealthy all-or-nothing mentality. An additional problem i've found is it also creates an accountability blind spot to bingeing & edging as the frequency & severity isn't conveyed through a day counter. If you keep track of PMOs, edging or whatever, you have to put each time down and it means you're holding yourself truly accountable for everything you do.
I appreciate your approach on this, Orbiter! I think it's been helping you (as an outsider observer). I know what you mean about counters not telling the whole story. I have two thoughts on that:
1. Understanding this danger, my thought is, well, if I engage in this behavior (edging, p-subs) long enough, I'm going to eventually cross my red-lines and reset anyway. So, I've used them as a kind of bufferzone. But this may not have helped me as I've thought...
2. I did start tracking my p-subs or edging behaviors elsewhere, each morning how I did... this gave me awareness, but eventually only served in making me think too much about these behaviors.
I'm doing good currently regarding these 'middle-circle' behaviors, so glad for that. My final or current thought now is, I'll track my days (currently with different counters), but if further analysis is needed, I'll just journal about it either here, or in my hard journal.
Bottom line, you're right about self-accountability, however one does that.