The point values doubling quickly becomes absolutely impossible to overcome even with the best play possible. This score was only possible because I reset until I got a super 3 million point combo on level 1, the special gars/powerups do basically nothing to improve your score in any significant way. Also the 0.25% chances of getting a powerup are totally worthless, especially since even if it shows up it easily can still just be in a place where you'll never get to match it.
I'd guess so. The newer version is much more reasonable in curve and thus more fun. Yeah it's a higher score but it doesn't feel like I could go infinitely. One thing that would be nice though is when I have a board with no moves like here it reshuffles or allows me to make a non-matching move or something. Wouldn't have beaten this level anyways but still a bit :/ to be just stuck for half the time doing nothing.