The ball actually isn't "binary". Depending on the balls weight factor and distance from the vacuum the amount of suction varies linearly. However the game is discarding speed fractions erroneously and I didn't have time to find out why, so you end up with speeds varying much harder than they should.
There's a bit of a trick to getting the ball into the hole, just try getting it slightly away from the goal, and then suck almost straight up so you have very little x vector, and lots of y, so you come down almost directly into the hole.
Due to lack of time, the designer (me), was unable to make enough levels to naturally let your skills in ball handling progress to the point where you could handle the third level gauntlet easily. However for me (the programmer and tester) I was able to handle it fairly well due to my hours of play-testing :P