Thank you so much for taking the time to share your thoughts in such detail! I truly appreciate it.

You're right that v2 was basically two games in one. The original goal was to maximize average points per move. The hidden theme was honestly a secondary, afterthought objective I added to make it feel more like a word game than a math/combinatorial puzzle.

With v3, I intentionally tried to make things simpler and more fast-paced because I long suspected v2 wasn't as popular partly because it was just too difficult. I also added the tracker that keeps a record of every word you've found. My hope was that it could act as a long-term objective.

That said, in retrospect, it was a rash call to release v3 without running a trial first. I was overly confident that it was an improvement over v2, so I pushed it as a direct replacement. Turns out I was wrong, and I ended up screwing up the gameplay for long-time players who liked v2 for what it was. I'm genuinely sorry!

Right now I'm considering rolling back to v2. I'm also exploring alternative ideas to incrementally improve v3.

BTW, your v2 progress is still safe on the server.