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Trying to take this seriously... maybe it's a function of expectations about the puzzle-solving process.
While several of the more complex puzzles in this series have ended up being collaborative affairs, this is, essentially, designed a "race" to see who gets the answer first.
In that sense, this puzzle went to a new extreme with the sense that even getting a big breakthrough didn't mean much of anything... since there were three or four big breakthroughs needed to actually solve it. So, if you were working on it early, and had some particularly keen insight (like whoever was first to connect to baseball players, in this case) you really weren't practically closer to solving the whole puzzle.
Add in the fact that some of the clues here were probably a step or two harder than we're used to... and it all added up to some frustration, I think. (Especially if a person who has gotten the "right" idea doesn't know it until it's confirmed by the author -- in my mind, that's a reasonable separation point)
I'm glad to have made some small contribution... but even with a number of us working on it, this one needed a fair amount of hand-holding to get done. The person who "solved" it, it turns out, probably was just the person who happened to stumble onto the last "breakthrough" solution at the right time -- and might not have been responsible for any/many of the previous advances. It's the nature of the beast with a multi-step puzzle... I'm just thinking out loud about that structural issue.
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