Elos aren't TOO bad - their main advantage is "ease of use" (although I suppose that's a bit subjective). Don't listen at all to the 10ml mark on the test tube, that's complete fiction. Also (as you sort of figured out for yourself already), DON'T use the cap. I have broken so many test tubes trying to put on the cap, or take it off, that it's not even funny. Those test tubes break if you so much as look at them wrong.
if you ask me, cycling is a bit of an art. The problem is that adding something like shrimp (or even household ammonia) and then leaving it, is that it's an addition of the catalyst; but then as it's used up, it isn't replaced, which tends to pull the bacterial numbers back down. In "real life" it tends to be a little more steady state and thus you get the population numbers to be constant.
But in this case I think you're better off to let the grunge from the rock to cycle out before you really push forward because that has to be fairly gross stuff in there if you even found a dead fish it it (
). I'd probably want to let that cycle out and then and a bunch more live rock in the sump and then maybe some hermits or something and see how that goes. The more I think about it, the more I realize I kind of have no idea what to suggest on how to manage the cycle properly when starting a tank from scratch like this.