equal spaced pattern question

I was watching this video on Solidworks' Youtube channel and the topic was about patterns.

one of the things I do a lot in my part design is create a series of features equally spaced. perfect for a pattern right? my issue is that I also want the distance from the edge to the center to be the same spacing as the distance from instance to instance.

in a simplified example, I want this:

the way I usually create it is to create it all on one sketch. I use construction lines that are all equal and I place a sketch of my feature at each vertex between two construction lines. everything is then set to equal and usually it works. the problems are that it creates a much more complicated sketch (I'm not always making circles) and if I ever want to increase or decrease the spacing (add or remove an instance) I have to add or delete sketch entities and reestablish all the relations.

in the video they showed how to create a pattern up to a reference and even offset the last instance in the pattern by a set amount. using an equation you can then set the last instance offset distance equal to the first feature offset distance. doing all of this yields this. the first and last features are both the same distance away from the edges and the instances are equally spaced.

the parameters for the pattern are as follows.

I can vary the number of instances, but the original sketch is always going to be offset by whatever I first defined it to be. can I create the pattern (or first sketch feature) such that the offset distance will be equal to the pattern spacing? is this a chicken and egg issue where the pattern can't know the spacing without the first feature being created but I can't create the first feature offset without knowing the pattern spacing?

thoughts?