Don’t quite understand your last question. The key is to work clean. Clean hands, clean tools, clean workspace and clean fresh tape on the glassing racks. You want to hot coat as soon as possible after your lam coat is cured. The surface remains slightly tacky on a poly lam job and the sooner you get it hot coated the better. I always lam and hot coat both sides of a board in the same day. This is very easily accomplished using UV resin.
For epoxy, a microfiber cloth, and nothing else.
HS-
Your engineer friend could be brilliant but sounds like that they are missing some knowledge and/or direct experience with the materials in question.
PE laminating resin is designed to be air-inhibited aka ‘tacky’ after cure to allow the next layer to stick to the previous one.
Sanding and gloss resins have a wax component that blooms to the surface before the resin gels to provide a barrier to the air which allows the resin to cure without the tackiness.
To learn about this the hard way, overwork a gloss coat…the bloom gets disturbed and the board will be partially tacky with brush stroke ruts everywhere.
Some people put a couple rounds of masking tape on their glassing stands, there might be some clues in the Fiberglass Hawaii videos where Otis is glassing.
Also read up on the catalogue descriptions, technical data sheets, and material safety date sheets for all the materials you intent to use in your process.