  Binary stars evolve into chemically-peculiar objects and are a major driver
of the Galactic enrichment of heavy elements. During their evolution they
undergo interactions, including tides, that circularize orbits and synchronize
stellar spins, impacting both individual systems and stellar populations. Using
Zahn's tidal theory and MESA main-sequence model grids, we derive the governing
parameters $\lambda_{lm}$ and $E_2$, and implement them in the new MINT library
of the stellar population code BINARY_C. Our MINT equilibrium tides are 2 to 5
times more efficient than the ubiquitous BSE prescriptions while the
radiative-tide efficiency drops sharply with increasing age. We also implement
precise initial distributions based on bias-corrected observations. We assess
the impact of tides and initial orbital-parameter distributions on
circularization and synchronization in eight open clusters, comparing synthetic
populations and observations through a bootstrapping method. We find that
changing the tidal prescription yields no statistically-significant improvement
as both calculations typically lie within 0.5$\sigma$. The initial
distribution, especially the primordial concentration of systems at
$\log_{10}(P/{\rm d}) \approx 0.8, e\approx 0.05$ dominates the statistics even
when artificially increasing tidal strength. This confirms the inefficiency of
tides on the main sequence and shows that constraining tidal-efficiency
parameters using the $e-\log_{10}(P/{\rm d})$ distribution alone is difficult
or impossible. Orbital synchronization carries a more striking age-dependent
signature of tidal interactions. In M35 we find twice as many synchronized
rotators in our MINT calculation as with BSE. This measure of tidal efficiency
is verifiable with combined measurements of orbital parameters and stellar
spins.
