We had a long discussion of this in discord, so I just want to quickly make a couple of points that weren't made there.
It's not exactly accurate to say this trick was
decided not to be a glitch (and yes, I know that I was the one who used that word). We don't have any kind of ruling body that decides what's a glitch and what isn't. In the case of the digger-blocker trick, it was first discovered by ccexplore and referred to as the "Wild 15 glitch" -- this was a period of the forum's history when glitches were kept secret, often because their finders wanted to make levels requiring the glitch to stump people with. Then, when it became known that "Wild 15 glitch" referred to the digger-blocker trick, there was a little discussion, and those involved came to the conclusion that it shouldn't be classed as a glitch -- but again, "those involved" were a tiny subset of the forum. And at the time, the glitch/non-glitch distinction was
only relevant for whether a solution got the "glitch" tag in challenge topics. The main level creation tool was Lemmix, which aimed to mimic the behaviour of DOS Lemmings precisely, glitches and all -- and it was considered perfectly acceptable for levels to rely on glitches in their solutions. (After all, we didn't know then that anyone would ever go to the effort of making a glitch-free Lemmings clone.)
Nowadays, things are very different, with both NeoLemmix and Lix aiming to be glitch-free. So it is intended behaviour that the digger-blocker trick works in both programs. However, there has never (to my knowledge) been a real debate over whether this mechanic should be kept or not; it's just there because it's always been there and it's never really been questioned.
* * *
While I wouldn't say I
hate the new skills, I am firmly in the traditionalist camp, as you can see from my pack-in-progress GemLems, which uses only the 8 original skills, no new object types, predominantly the original tilesets, and even eschews vertical-scrolling levels. You are not alone
* * *
Rhapsody in Blue was designed way back when I had far less experience (well, the mere fact that it's a Cheapo level serves to date it), and so the original lose-3 version was hopelessly backroute-ridden. Once I discovered the digger-blocker trick, I realised that incorporating it into the intended solution would make it lose-2, which would fix all the "Compression Method" type backroutes at a stroke. I preferred a backroute-free version using an obscure trick over a backroute-ridden version without the trick. That's an aesthetic preference and I accept that you might feel differently. But note that the version with the trick is, of necessity, much harder, which is why it's in the last rank of the Lix community pack (the Cheapo version was never in a pack, so its difficulty was never ranked against other levels). The Hopeless rank -- and even the penultimate rank, Vicious -- includes many other levels that use similarly obscure tricks as deeply hidden parts of the solution. That's why this rank is only for experts, and in five years I still haven't completed half the levels. So you are definitely not "dumb" because you didn't solve it for yourself. (Also, it took me roughly ten years to solve Insane Steve's "Attack of the Subconscious".)
Also in the Hopeless rank are "Behind Bars", which was a layout I found in a set of levels I made on paper when I was 9, that happened to have the potential for a decent puzzle; "Path of Wickedness", which is just one of Insane Steve's levels where I found a solution with 2 or 3 of each skill so I trimmed the skillset to alternating 2s and 3s; "Labyrinth of Despair", which is similarly taken from a namida level and has 3 of each; "You only get one bash at it", which came about from the discussion of a one-way widget in one of mobius's levels; and "The Continuum Hypothesis", which shamelessly rips off "I am A.T."
In other words, all my difficult levels have come about by chance or through borrowing from other designers. I can never compete with people like Nepster and namida who seem to effortlessly produce really high-quality difficult levels, or Nessy, who makes levels that look absolutely gorgeous.
I'm not going to give up, though. I keep telling myself that maybe one day I'll get there.
