eyyy thanks for the comprehensive breakdown dude! You're so right about the relationship between picking up worms and destroying stuff.
The core goal is to get a big destruction score, with the worms helping you get bigger to destroy bigger things that give a better score. In the end, we settled on the worms keeping the score multiplier alive at least, but ran out of time to go further on them. Would definitely completely overhaul how worms are collected and also look into adding something that could steal your worms (kaiju-sized hadeda anyone?) if we were to add more.
mole not care about game mechanic, mole currently munching on milky way galaxy