Size vs Quantity & Quality of Deals for PE recruiting

I'm a first year analyst at a US BB in London. Was an early starter so seniority wise I'm still only two months into the job with a fair bit to go until PE recruiting which is normally around 1 year into the job.

It's been an excellent learning experience so far and I've managed to pick up a reasonable amount of deal experience (3 ongoing mergers, 1 MF PE stake sale (terminated very early on however). That said, they aren't the largest of mergers (All < Euro 1bn, except the stake sale) but my experience / quality of the learning has been truly immaculate. It's always been me + one associate / senior analyst in the junior deal team.

My questions are the following:

• Does the size of the deal matter as much as the quality of the experience and how well you can articulate every aspect of the deal / strategic rationale / process / genuine knowledge of the valuation etc, when it comes to PE recruiting?

• The stake sale was by far the larger transaction although it was pulled very early on. My knowledge of the company, industry dynamics and valuation is really immaculate as the other deals are in a similar subvertical. Do you reckon its safe to feign that we prepared more preliminary valuation materials than we actually did? Cannot imagine that's something they can fact check and I really know the industry very well.