"you can freely change spaces that are not impacted by symbols"
That was the major confusion. There's no reason for that to be the case. It's completely ludicrous to assume you're straight up given the answers on the puzzle itself without needing to look anywhere else, by looking at which circles have symbols on them. When I first looked at the puzzle, it looked like Minesweeper to me, because I'm definitely not going to assume it's not a puzzle.
I guess the problem is not that it's too difficult, but that it's way, way, way too easy, to the point that my instinct is to majorly overthink it, and the only difficult part is figuring out the interface.
Honestly, if you want my suggestion for what the tutorial should say, it should just say "I need to figure out how this panel interface works." That immediately tells me that's the entire puzzle.