@Armani Your solutions to both my R1 and R2 are intended!
You did indeed get all 3 of the tricks I intended in my R1: cancelling a digger with a blocker, using a backwards miner to make a wall climbable for a climber, and turning a digger around with a blocker. Honestly I'm quite surprised to hear from everyone telling me that my R1 is hard. At the same time, there was another fix I considered using for the level, but then I felt it was going to give away the solution completely. There's also a lot of trickery here for such a small level where if you don't use the skills as intended you'll going to end up short on skills every time. So, it looks like I have indeed succeeded in making an extremely deceptive and hard level
You are correct in that your solution to my R3 is still a backroute. I have uploaded a V3 of it. Let's see if this stops your backrouting now
Also hopefully it's now just as hard as my R1 or possibly even harder, as IMO my R3 is the hardest of all my contest entries.
Also I just wanted to comment on your solution to Icho's R1, as I pretested his contest entries. We have the same solution, I simply used the skills in a different order. Icho said that my solution was "95% intended." And yes, I agree with you that his R1 is hard.
Thanks again for playing my levels, Armani!
I have definitely learned a lot in the process.