A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.
This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.
Unfortunately, a lot of lenses change focal length upon a change of focus, which can cause messy stitching. I'd look up some specialist macro sites to see what they do, often, a sliding macro rail is used.
Yeah, I'd recommending using the sharpest f/stop and have heavy overlap between shots.