Well, I started doing the project because I wanted to try out an idea for animating something following a surface (like the pickup on the record), so I wanted a pronounced effect. I also feel like it gets a more "retro" and cozy feel to the scene - like someone has brought out that one beat-up record you play every Christmas. But in retrospect I should probably have toned it down a bit.

For anyone interested; I have a mesh with a single vertex with a shrinkwrap modifier set to project and the target set to the surface (the record), and then I parent an empty to that vertex, and another empty to that empty (to have an offset). I then simply use a track-to constraint on the thing I want to follow the surface.