I love how many strategies there are for nuking smother. She's Divine/Riding, so Nobu can stack her buffs to great effect, Ushi can walk in between the crystals to lay down Hassou Tobi whenever she damn well pleases, Carmilla and Jack both work well with their anti-Female NPs, Tesla and Edison are both anti-Mystery, so even they can lay down the law if you don't have anyone better... Hell, as people have mentioned, just bring in your best single-target nuker and they'll probably do it just fine with decent supports.
Headpat loli runs probably require bringing in Martha or Marie to get their NPs up to burst down the crystals first and foremost. What happens to them afterward isn't your problem.
The only problem with using AoEs against smother is that she's evidently a big fan of Imagine Dragons and likes to use them to get ready for her nuke NP.
As for me, I'm using Nobunobu strats; Nobu/Waver/Mash in the front, I don't care who's in the back much, but Medea Lily is in slot 4 for Nobu heals and Altera's in the last slot just in case. With Pheasant Beans, I'm actually not caring quite as much about my exact strategies, and the fact that there's two Pseudo-Servants and a Man attribute in the front line means that in the rare case she uses Mystic Slayer, it's a wasted action. As long as Mash gets off her invuln (or her NP at minimum) on Nobu so smother's NP doesn't wipe my attacker off the field, it's actually a pretty easy 6M (compared to impossible green; kind of iffy blue, and semi-reliable red). Only twice has it actually gotten to the point where Altera had to deal with cleanup.
Mystic Code-wise, I've actually been using the Mage Association Uniform. Free 20% NP once during the battle is actually pretty potent when you have Waver or Arts chains getting you close enough, and rolling the dice with the command card change occasionally nets me a good result.
If you're having trouble getting more damage off with Nobu, try giving your frontline NP Charge CEs, and burst her down with 300% Three Line Formation, since the multiplier off anti-Riding increases with OC. Or pair her with a star generator so her second and third skills combine into a devastating crtizkrieg via a Brave Chain.
We cut it pretty close on red oni - about 44 minutes left. We have the advantage of two more hours this time thanks to this raid ending on the daily rollover instead of based on the time we killed the last oni, and we've already cleaved a pretty big hole in smother's mountains. The closing of the Arash loophole (get to solo Arash, Stella the first wave away to instantly end the battle and somehow get the oni's and supporter's drops too) might make some of the exploiters actually start to burst down the crystals now the normal way, so we get more damage off on smother.
Regarding damage fixing, I'm reasonably certain there's some minor massaging, but I feel like a lot of people forget that the NA server is cast over a humongous net - unlike JP, where pretty much all the action happens in one time zone; by the time I get to sleep at midnight, the East Coast is already starting to wake up and go do business. If the massive bursts happen late PM East Coast time, all that really means is that the entire country is actually smashing oni face in all at once because most of us are off work and actually have time to do the smashing.