Going back to your question about indexing tier 2, since nobody answered it and it is the most important thing in this thread....
No, you do not need those tier 2 links indexed. Crawled and indexed are two different things and people mix them up constantly. A tier 2 link does its job the moment the page it sits on gets crawled, because that crawl is what leads the bot to your tier 1. Whether that tier 2 page ever lands in the index is irrelevant. This is also why paying an indexer for lower tiers is mostly wasted money, you end up paying to index pages whose only job was to be a road.
On the nofollow thing, the answer you got was accurate in about 2018. Google changed nofollow from a directive to a hint in 2019 and announced it publicly, and it has been treated as a hint since. But forget the announcement and just look at where nofollow links actually live. Wikipedia, Reddit, Quora, YouTube descriptions, most news sites, nearly every social platform. Some of the most valuable placements on the internet are nofollow by default. If nofollow genuinely passed nothing, nobody would be paying for Reddit placements, and people pay a lot for them.
Where RankerX actually let you down is the job you gave it. Those links were never tier 1 material. Point them straight at a money site and you will see nothing, which is exactly what happened. Point them at something that already links to your money site and they do fine. i own a RankerX lifetime licence and still use it for web 2.0s. Good tool, wrong layer.
GSA SER is where i do most of my building and the reason is purely cost. One time fee around $99, xevil is also one time, then your only running costs are a VPS, proxies and a link list. Call it $100 a month for everything. Set against buying links at $50 to $300 each and needing dozens per project, it stops being a comparison. i build 300-500 contextual links per tier and a few thousand on the lower tiers, across as many projects as i want, for that same flat cost. It runs overnight and i check on it weekly. The saving is not the price per link, it is that the cost stops scaling with volume at all.
Worth saying i run GSA on all tiers, money sites included, with tight filters and proper content. i know others here build tier 1 manually and only automate below it. Both approaches work, it comes down to how disciplined your filtering and content are.
Last thing, be careful hunting for vendors selling only ******** indexed links. A natural profile is mostly nofollow. Anyone offering you 100% ******** from DA50 sites is either selling links from sites that exist purely to sell links, or not telling you what the attribute really is. That is a far bigger footprint than any nofollow ever was.
