I'm sorry but I don't see how people can be on their high horse about "getting hints" when in the same breath they accept that using an on-line Playfair solver is fine.
I have been trying to solve the Listener on and off for more years than I care to remember and getting nowhere apart from the odd Apex and Zander puzzle (can't see how any of the new setters compare with them, they all want to be Sabre or Kea, apart from the dreadful Dipper!). In the past five years I have finished exactly 8 Listeners, and only sent in one when I felt I had deserved to.
I don't trouble JEG with my entries as I'm a pretty hopeless solver (hence my name!) but I can never improve my solving and understanding without seeing how to get there. Waiting three weeks till the solution is published is like cleaning up after the Lord Mayor's coach and horses have gone past.
Turning the Listener into a Masonic lodge is hardly the way to get in younger solvers, or does everyone accept that we are doomed, eventually to be swallowed up by a Japanese Sudoku beast?
If you don't want hints or nudges, don't come here. Are solvers here so desperate to want to win dictionaries or an invite to a dinner they have to stump up a lot of money for? I just don't see it.