When I began roasting, in my oven - and frequently baking my beans - the smell was wonderful ... however never managed to get a decent roast out of it.
With the Gene Café, there is very little smell, but I get really good roasts.

I think there was some misunderstanding... Backing off on the heat in a 1400watt popper is to avoid racing into 2c and getting sour beans. That doesn't mean the bean temps are not still increasing. During the last couple of minutes I creep the power back up. The issue is reducing the intensity of the heat transfer.

About the coffee fragrance mystery.

Normally I finish my roasts by color, however after watching Nordic roasting videos, were they use very short development times, I experimented roasting one batch with three minutes after 1C, the next batch (same bean) with four minutes (that's about my normal time) and the third was (different beans, similar density) by color, that was about 4:30 development time.

Haven't tried them yet, however one hour after roasting I noticed that the first one (shorter time) had a wonderful fragrance, that the others lacked.

Follow up: About 15 hours latter, there was almost no fragrance left (open jars, degasing) all three batches were about the same.
Tried it in a V60, nice floral fragrance while grinding however not in the cup, taste was OK but nothing remarkable, at least yet ...