No, I'm not trying to embarrass you, I think your a frigging hero the way you approached this carrier endever and placed first in your first contest. I'm thinking you should due an article explaining the reason you thought to try S40 and how you went about preparing the plane and yourself to fly the event plus the result's and have John T put it in the carrier section of his web site. I'm impressed with how you went about this, the good questions that you asked, coming back and asking for more clarification while sending pictures of what you were doing to the plane the whole time.
Thank goodness you didn't do the damn nose dive thing which is completely wrong. The guy you talked to and told you what he did to land did you a big favor and you played it forward with great results. I have several carrier planes where the tip of the hook sits below the bottom the fuselage and when I fly off of grass the hook is always loaded with grass as I fly the HS (cool or not Cool). The problem with the tail skid hook besides not being cool is you can't fly off of grass very well. On my planes that have that type of hook I just take it off and put a skid on to practice and then put the hook on before flying off a deck.
I think the trouble your having putting the hook down is you probably aren't giving it enough down which is good and bad. Bad because the hook didn't go down, good because if it did go down would have meant the plane crashed after its high speed stall, or you ended up with the elevator stuck in down with other associated results. I had the same trouble with my first carrier plane and was told, "oh just reach up and jerk the down line" which I did and the bellcrank over rotated into down (locked up). Carrier planes don't need very much down elevator. I've set up my hook to release on about 5 degrees of down elevator which I found to mean that I would release the elevator be mistake on occasions when I was picking up the control handle so then I finally found a way around that. I've attached pictures of how I fixed that problem.
AND, having said all that with pictures to boot, just think your doing fine just the way you have yours set up now (how bout that). So any way, keep doing what you have been doing.