I agree... I designed the game as a pure word ladder at first, but it simply was too hard to "find your way" to the goal, because usually all letters need to be changed at least once to reach it (the graph distance is about 20 nodes between the words).
I only discovered how hard this is halfway through programming the game, so, I tried to fix it with the powerups, but they kinda ruined the puzzling element completely.
If anyone got any idea on how to solve that design problem, I'm all ears!