On Monday, March 5, 2018 at 9:30:42 AM UTC, Gerald Kelleher wrote:

As direct/retrogrades are a result of the planets moving back and forth against the background stars, it should be no problem applying the same principles to Venus and Mercury as they run smaller loops around the Sun from our perspective so the Earth's orbital motion doesn't contribute to their direct/retrograde motions.

This is completely wrong. Here are the dates of 4 successive eastern elongations of Venus

Mar 29 2004
Nov 3 2005
Jun 9 2007
Jan 14 2009

If your ideas were correct, Venus would be back at its Eastern elongation after one orbit, 224 days. It isn't, because you are utterly wrong.

Unlike yourself, the ancient astronomers were aware of this fact - they set the epicycle of Venus to 584 days to account for it.