What is taking so long?

Okay, so this plant has been taking FOREVER on like every stage except veg. I planted this girl Dec 9 so were going on like 5 months.... She looks great... Lots of crystals coated around the buds but it seems like she's taking waaay longer than what it should normally take... It's a northern lights auto flowering but it was like month 3-4 and no buds so I switched the lights to 12 12 shortly one hair popped up then a few more then it began to bud. The cola looks great it seems to have grown significantly while all my other buds right now are only popcorn sized. I've devoted a lot of time to side lighting as I have three warm CFL 55w in the setup as shown in "Buds for Less" along with two 26w cfl on the sides. I'm using miracle grow (please spare me the lectures for now). As well I read buds are ready when about 25 percent of hairs are brown but my plants hairs I'd say are around that percentage but the buds themselves look still too small.

She couldnt have been an auto then as shed have flowered automaticaly (funnily enough lol) and would have been long harvested.
The best thing to do would be to check the trichs.
Shes looking good though,I have a NL growing myself but shes just started flowering.
Good luck

This was bought from a seed bank Bonza seeds in particular and was labeled northern lights auto flowering. Although I speculate the genes may be screwy that's why she never auto flowered.

Is examining the trichs possible without a magnifying aid?

No,I use a jewlers loupe,it has 30x magnification but I wish Id held off and got something a little more powerful,however it will do the job.Took these pics just by taping it on my camera;theyre not the clearest but you get the idea

its common for autos to not flower on more than 12 hours light. you have to understand that its a type of lowryder crossed with a regular plant, so imo its still too early for a solid strain to exist in most auto strains.