still super early in experimenting with sun orientation but my guess from the results so far would be that there's a period early in the life cycle of the seedlings where the direction of the sun strongly influences the angle of growth and once they're past that stage the effects are pretty irreversible or, at least, harder to change.
the sun is at the bottom of this photo and as a result most of the seedlings are leaning heavily in that direction. the seedlings in the top left corner aged with the sun in the other direction and seemed pretty unaffected by the directional change - which is to say that they're still leaning at an extreme angle.
leaning in any direction at an extreme angle isn't something I want to encourage (and is probably why professional growers have lamps directly above their seedlings to ensure that they grow strong and straight during the early stages of their lives). leaning too much in any direction is probably a waste of good energy and is probably going to have negative long term effects on the overall strength of the plant.
for now I'm going to rotate the seed tray every day and see if that can correct some of the lean.
also crazy to look back to three days ago when there were almost no seedlings in this tray. nature is wild.