Listener 4340 Red Shift By Nudd

[midazolam]

With Shackleton last week and now this puzzle, the Listener is finally picking up pace after a rather slow start to the year.

This puzzle is fun. Straightforward fill and a pleasing endgame. Puzzles do not have to be hard to be enjoyable. However, easier grid-fills must have a worthy theme, as in this one.

Thanks Nudd

[rhona121]

I'm in awe at the skill of setters who can create such elegant puzzles.

[IainGrace]

Finished but took ages to make sense of the final six letter run of extra letters - mainly because we had got one wrong. A theme well known to one of us, but not the other.

[Whenland]

Found this quite hard but well worth the effort. Thank you Nudd!

[Nudd]

Many thanks to all for comments and feedback here - I'm pleased to see that many enjoyed this but apologise to you Scorpius for the offence my grid clearly caused you. I can assure you that despite its faults, I was proud to submit the puzzle as it was the first I ever created. It may fail on Ximean aesthetics but I did feel that it worked in plenty of other ways and it seems to have been generally well received so far.
Until the next time

[Scorpius]

My apologies, Nudd. I fear I'm the one who's caused offence. Had I realised this was a debut puzzle I'd have been less inclined to criticise the grid. The number of unchless entries didn't lessen my enjoyment of the puzzle but they did make it quite easy.
I don't think it's a question of aesthetics. If a solver has all the crossing answers, an entry with no unches doesn't need to be solved. It's not quite as straightforward as that in your puzzle because the solver still needs to sort out the wordplay and shifts to get the messages, but nonetheless I reached a point where I had a full grid with several clues not tackled.

Obviously it's different if grid entries are different from clue answers, in which case some setters make concessions in fairness to the solver.

As a setter myself I'd be the first to admit that my grids sometimes fall short of the ideal, and when I started setting puzzles I was less fussy about grids than I am now, but I've always been impressed by setters like Kea, Shackleton, Schadenfreude and a host of others who produce puzzle after puzzle with perfectly-formed Ximenean grids, and that's what I aim for even if I don't always succeed.

Sorry again if I came across as carping and unappreciative. I enjoyed the clues, sorting out the word shifts and the endgame.

[Nudd]

Many thanks for those comments Scorpius. I submitted the puzzle over 6 years ago and would like to think that my grid construction has improved with subsequent efforts. Or maybe not: Although the stunning grid was not my creation, I was party to Rood's Elementary Deduction so am guilty by association - that puzzle if I recall correctly had 18 zero unched entries and an average entry length of just 5.18 letters. It ended up winning the AGC. Clearly an instance of substance over style.
But yes, that's an exception, and I do seriously try nowadays to observe Ximean rules of grid construction even if I don't always succeed. Thanks again for your comments, much appreciated