A lift set for the water you actually get

Tide and wake decide the setup

On the north bank the water level at your seawall is a moving target. The river swings through the day and the canals off it swing right along with it, so a lift here gets set to a range instead of a level. The shallow end of that range is the one doing the deciding, because that is when the cradle still has to be under your hull and your boat still has to float on and off it without drama.

The other thing the river hands you out on open frontage is traffic. Wake and current shove a boat sideways in the exact moment you are trying to line it up, which is why guide posts, cradle orientation and honest bunk placement stop being nice extras and start being the difference between docking and wrestling. Back in the canals off the river, that pressure disappears and the constraint becomes room: frontage, the neighbors' structures, and leaving yourself a way to walk past with the boat up.

Most north bank docks are older than the boats parked beside them, so a lift here is usually an addition rather than part of the original plan. That is normal, and it is most of what the free look is actually settling: whether the frontage can take a lift without crowding the dock you already walk on, and how the new structure and the inherited one share the water without either getting in the other's way. The owner works that out with you at the seawall, and the run over from home base is one of the shortest we make.