Best Laythe launch profile?

[DeepSpaceDutch]

So after mucking around near Kerbin and Duna I've set my sights on the Jool system. After some probes and a succesful manned return mission I now want to set up a permanent colony on Layhte and explore from there.

However, during the manned return mission I barely managed getting back into orbit around Laythe. I was really confident that I over-enginered the ascent stage so that was quite a surprise.

That made me wonder if my launch profile could have been more efficient. I just winged it during the last mission, starting the gravity turn at 8km where I went to an 45 degree angle. So was this a wrong move? Or did I just underestimate the requirements of getting into orbit around Laythe?

[Blue]

When I was testing my lander for Laythe, it was actually made for Tylo with Laythe as an afterthought, simply with the addition of parachutes. (Granted, it was a rocket-assisted parachute landing...) The benchmark of those two landing-takeoff requirements is having enough delta-v to be able to be used as an SSTO from Kerbin. If you can launch your Laythe lander from the Launchpad into LKO without havnig to stage anything, it has enough power to get into Laythe orbit with fuel to spare, or land on Tylo if you 'don't spare the horses'.

I know I'd be horribly botching the math for this rough approximation, but in my playing, I do my gravity turns to 5-10° at 10km on Kerbin, 30° at 20km and 60° at 45km. With Kerbin's atmosphere terminating at ~70km, scaling these values down according to Laythe's atmosphere terminating at 55km, you'd begin your gravity turn at 8km to 10°, 16km to 30° and to 60° at 35km. Then again, the counterpoint to all of this would be the fact that I am one of those who actually will trial-and-error savebomb rather than actually planning an ascent and such with math.