Centennial Blonde + Beersmith = mistakes

I am not speaking ill of either, but USER ERROR lead to what is likely a watery beer.
I have a 10 gallon rubbermaid MLT and a 10 gallon kettle. This was my first adventure in All Grain with my equipment. I bought Beersmith, but could not seem to get a good handle on how much water. I obviously made mistakes within BeerSmith, but for a 5 gallon batch, it had me putting in about 10 gallon water total. I knew some would boil off and be absorbed within the grain, but I guess i had assumed more would be absorbed. Ended up with about 8 pre-boil and i pumped some out so that I could have better hop utilization.

Any have issues with Beersmith or am I just a ritard?

****5 Gallon Batch****

Batch Size: 5.50 gal
Boil Size: 6.57 gal
Estimated OG: 1.040 SG
Estimated Color: 3.9 SRM
Estimated IBU: 21.5 IBU
Brewhouse Efficiency: 70.0 %
Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
Amount
7.00 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM)
0.75 lb Cara-Pils/Dextrine (2.0 SRM)
0.50 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt - 10L (10.0 SRM)
0.50 lb Vienna Malt (3.5 SRM)
0.25 oz Centennial [9.50%] (55 min)
0.25 oz Centennial [9.50%] (35 min)
0.25 oz Cascade [7.80%] (20 min)
0.25 oz Cascade [7.80%] (5 min)
1 Pkgs Nottingham (Danstar #-) (Hydrated)


Mash at 150 degrees for 60 minutes.

yes

Play with the evaporation rate to adjust to you equipment. Maybe

sorry i couldn't help myself. now that your doing ag start taking notes. most importantly mash wort yield and boil off. if you know thos you can tailor bs to your style. for instance you want a 5.5 gal return your boil off is 1 gal so u need 6.5 post boil assume .5 gal for shrink/trub/hops. so now u need 7 gal perboil. now if you mash with say 5 gal and get back 3 from it you need to sparge with 4 gals. bs makes a lot of assumptions and use averages it up to you to dial it in

that grain bill with my equipment, I got a little less than 8 gallons between strike and sparge and 6.75 going into the boil

unfortunately, until you get your equipment dialed in and input into YOUR equipment profile, it will be off.

first you need to know your boil-off rate, that will give you how much you need from your mash and how much you need going into the boil

so, strike at whatever ratio your recipe calls for (.9 to 3 qts/lb, with 1.25 to 2 being common), taking into account any deadspace. mash and take first runnings. MEASURE. whatever amount you are short on what your boil volume should be is how much sparge water to add. grain absorption and that deadspace is accounted for in the strike, so all you need is enough sparge water to get you to boil volume