Hello,
tldr: Nope, you should be playing rightmost 1 first, and playing second rightmost should tell everyone you are seeing bk1.
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So we should start by the basics, assume you don't play with black bowder, and so 5 suits or 6 suits normal.
Someone give you three 1s turn 1: 1-x-1-1, what do you play first?
So firstly if all 1s are the same or are different, what you play doesn't matter. So let's see the cases where 2 are the same and one is different:
1) r1-x-r1-b1
Here if you play leftmost first as usual, then the second one you will be playing would be the second r1, and it's bad.
If you play rightmost first, you will play b1, then r1, and then there is a chance either all 1s are clued or visible, or that you receive some others color clue which tell you for free that your last 1 is useless.
So rightmost is better.
2) r1-x-b1-r1
Here it's the same, playing left or right first will give the same upsides and downsides.
3) b1-x-r1-r1
Here leftmost would lead to b1 and r1 played first and that's good.
About rightmost, if you can you really want to make that player discard. If you can wait to clue them, or if you can show them somehow that they should discard (per example by stealing their clue), and if they discard, you will be able to clue 1 and get b1+r1.
So leftmost is better, but you got more options with rightmost.
And so overall, rightmost is better. In your games, you should have seen that you got players who plays their 1s first from left to right because they just follow the usual rule and didn't understood the upside of rightmost (or want a simpler game), and you got players who optimise things and who plays 1s from right to left.
Often those kind of situations are annoying because it's a conflict between simplicity and optimality. The order of playing 1s has the big upside to very rarely causes problems (it can when you absolutely want a specific 1 played early, and so you could be forced to take safer line since you don't know the order that player will play their 1s).
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Since you talk about the discard position it stay the same reasonning, if you have g3-b1-r1-r1-g3, then you still have the option to make that player discard twice. That's a lot weaker so a lot more situationnal, but if you have ways to show to him they should discard once, and if nobody clue them after that, it should look like from their pov that their hand is really bad. And so they could be discarding twice.
About only have two 1s, that's much closer since my example doesn't work anymore. The thing which make you play leftmost first is that the card is new, and so if nobody clued you during one turn and you discarded (a non red card), and then you receive red clue: r-x-r-x, then this clue could have been given before: x-r-x-x and that wasn't. And so since no red card is on chop, that look logical to think that the leftmost red is playable.
But that's not the case at the start of the game, all your cards has been drawn at the same time, so when you receive a clue, the rightmost card clued has more value since it was closer from being discarded, even if you receive a red or a 2 clue. But for simplicity, bga and hgroup decided to make you play rightmost first for 1s, and leftmost first for others clues (you got value too to have different focus between color and number).
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Now to come back to black powder, we now know that rightmost should be the default option (especially since black powder is harder, it should attract more of the community who wanna play 'optimaly' ).
So rightmost said nothing.
And second rightmost (imo) should tell you that this player is seeing bk1.
