Stripping filament all of a sudden

First off, thank you to everyone that helps out on this board. Hope to some day be able to contribute. Gotta get my noob problems out of the way first. This one is weird.

I have a Prusa with a Greg's Wade's Hinged Extruder and a Budashnozzle hot end. I very recently swapped the original .50 mm nozzle for a new .35 mm nozzle so I could push up the resolution of my prints. First print went fine. I removed a color I didn't want, swapped in white, and printed successfully. Then today, I wanted to print with some new grey filament i got. Swapped the spool on and just could not get it to extrude. It was stripping like crazy and the material actually feels softer, so I blamed the grey filament put a red spool on that I've used before. At first it looked good, then it also started stripping. I took the idler down and cleaned the hobbing close to ten times over the last hour with varying idler tension each time. I also tried boosting the temp a bit to make it easier on the extruder. Nothing is working and I'm stumped. I tried both a ridiculous amount of tension where the idler was literally crushing the filament, and very light pressure and the whole range in between. How do problems like this manifest themselves out of nothing? So strange.

I would blame the smaller nozzle, but that it printed just fine on its first shot. Argh! Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.

Have you checked the nozzle for blockage? Mine ended up slowly trapping small filings from where the bearing rests on the hobbed bolt. Eventually it got clogged enough to start stripping the filament instead of extruding.

Thanks. The nozzle wasn't blocked. I knew it wasn't because I could get filament to extrude, just not consistently. Confirmed that by swapping my .5 nozzle back on today and eliminated the problem.
So I'm curious though, why would I have such a problem with a smaller nozzle? I know it takes more pressure to extrude through a smaller hole, but it sure seems like it's causing more problems than it should.
Fortunately, it's easy to swap nozzles on the Budashnozzle.

The pressure required is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the nozzle diameter, so using a smaller nozzle does limit the flow rate.

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