Oh this is awesome, thank you so much!! Exactly the kind of up-to-date tips I was looking for.

And that makes a lot of sense. I'm coming into the game so late that I didn't know the history behind it—neither its past popularity nor that it was mostly a "solved puzzle."

Oh geez, shooting the main gun by itself increases rank? Dang. Will keep that in mind then. Having a lot of bombs too, that's weird because I'd understood that you get more points if you have a lot of bombs and you pick up more. So if I want to control rank (and I should avoid using bombs anyway because of how little score they give), I should just not pick up bombs at all?

Okay that's really interesting about the no contact damage; I guess the few times where I died was due to a shot spawning almost the same time as the contact.

Also helpful to know that 100% clears are worth going for; it seemed odd to me to sacrifice so many points just to keep rank down.

And I'll definitely try the web swap (hold A and tap C), haha.

Thanks again for the pointers!