[Remarks inspired by the exchanges above; specific advice to the OP follows]
Gear 7 was never "awful" for me either.
When I first got my Rolloff-equipped bike, I checked that everything was set-up right, much like I would blue-print a mouse-motor (for the British: a Chevrolet small-block V8) intended for competition, taking the manual minimum tolerance as my maximum.
In relation to the Rohloff my excuse is that my attitude above is very common and highly praised both in automobiles and bicycles. (And, of course, if you ride a plastic bike today, you'd better pay attention the torque settings on attachments if you don't want an expensively crushed pipe.)
However, on reading the English Rohloff manual more carefully, at first I didn't believe my eyes: I concluded the translation must be at fault. On reading the German original, I was horrified: did this guy actually attend a proper German technical university? It was absolutely amazing: the designer of a German (this is an important consideration much larger than a mere stereotype) piece of agricultural machinery of excellent reputation wanted me to run it in a loose-goosey (thank you, Sheldon!) manner. Who ever heard of running a chain with a minimum bow slack of 10mm? What sort of German engineer would admit in public, in writing, that he didn't like the firm smack of gears engaging both heard and felt on tight cables? What the devil was wrong with the man to want the axle hardly more than finger-tight so that a cyclist with hair on his chest would need a wimpish low-torque instrument in his hand, even sometimes in public! On a bike that is otherwise set up with clearances, where required, of no more than 1mm!
When I understood that these low-stress settings formed a whole, rounded attitude (the Austro-German word is gestalt), entirely opposed to my high-performance experience and belief-system, I considered revolting and doing it my way, secure in the knowledge that the majority of engineers on the cycle-engineering forum I belong to would applaud my principled stance. Then I remembered my ten-year warranty, subject to annual inspections...
So I remade the settings as they came from the factory. It was in fact just as well that I hadn't yet sent the scathing letter I had drafted to send the manufacturer of my Rohloff bike (not Thorn) because I would have looked an awful fool.
I won't say the looser settings made my Rohloff more resistant to breakage or longer-lived (clearly the designer's intention) because my Rohloff, though often heavily loaded by my painting gear as well as my altogether too corporeal temporal presence and an electric setup with a humongous high-coulomb battery plus a motor chosen for its torque, is not stressed in the same way as high-mile commuters and world tourers stress their bikes; but I have no difficulty seeing how the official setup would work in failure-proofing their gearboxes.
What I will say is that the much more tolerant settings have made my Rohloff much easier to live with. I could probably make an arguable case that the tighter setting would have run-in my Rohloff box a bit quicker; this is not a negligible matter, as a Rohloff takes thousands of kilometers to run in: mine took 6-7-8000km, so a thousand klicks off would be a considerable matter, but then again, an equally arguable case would be that the initial harsh treatment would come off the other end of the Rohloff's lifespan, and would amount to a damned sight more than a miserable thousand klicks. But I didn't find the Rohloff noisy in my most-used gear 11, and what I objected to most, the psychologically depressing sighing sound in gears 7 and 8, wasn't objected to by too many other owners, and eventually went away; what was noticeable was that with my original tight setup the Rohloff was certainly ever so slightly noisier than with the book setup. (Understand, please: my Rohloff was pretty silent from the beginning, but I used to be a music critic and at one stage designed tube amplifiers and horn speaker enclosures for a living; my ears have lifelong training to hear sounds most people don't, and I identify them as noise when most people would dismiss, without conscious thought, the slight ambient disturbance as general background "white sound".)
Specific advice for the OP follows.
