Story: I want to push on to "Castle Retake" once I have a few 50cc30ish units (does that seem right?).
Challenges: I want to push on to "Phalax 2" at a similar time (I read I will need a witch CCed does that sound about right?)'
Daily: Attempting easy and normal dailies this week while I gauge what I will need for the hard monday and thursday dailies (advice welcome).
actually you should already rush to 1* skip castle retake by this point because leveling every unit (when you don't use them was somewhat pointless, but nvm. I guess I should edit my guide again. my fault, sorry.)

using EthEternal videos, you can actually 1* skip the necessary maps and just rush to phalanx 2 map which drops affection items + gold + plat fairies. and yes you probably need a cc'd witch.

as for marr, I'd say she's a bit hard to use since pre-AW and at lower levels, her heal will pretty much be lower than a healers. although her heal might well be better than a healers in poison maps.

as I've mentioned in my guide, soma vs daniela is a very minor thing. daniela has a better skill and higher base attack, but loses out on base 30% affection so actually spending effort to level her up would be a chore. but generally, the difference is negligible since you'll want to be using bashira and spica more often then these 2 temporary archers. and yes, silver archers are always the issue early game, since the game only gives you enough silver archers to cc bashira and 1 silver archer with iirc.

cypria is seriously a low priority unit aside from getting her to 250 atk to 1* skip castle retake.

as for cc'ing, there's no real need to rush everyone to cc together or leveling them all to 50 the way you did it to 35. what you actually needed to was to level units up 1 by 1 and get to the more efficient farming maps (fiery oasis 30 charisma map, and so on) while leveling whatever units you might need to use just enough to get past whatever map you were struggling with.