I can appreciate the intent to step back and rework the game, but I feel you missed the mark again.
It feels needlessly slow, blocking you off behind an arbitrary number of drops and your only way to actually speed up the process gets continually reset - 6 of the first 7 'stages' have no benefit!
I know progress continually resetting was something people heavily complained of before so I don't understand what possibly could've possessed you to continue with that system
To me, it honestly feels worse than before - it might have more potential than it did, but this version captures even less of what it *could* be.