Thanks for the great critique. You pretty much summed up my thoughts on the final product. I certainly wish I had more time for level design but creating levels with interesting optimal solutions turned out to be pretty time consuming. In the end I pretty much just threw together something, tweaked it a little bit and hoped for the best. It would be interesting to take this further and see what could be achieved with proper level design.
I felt that a step target would be better than a hard limit since coming up with an effective solution requires quite a bit of tries and/or thinking ahead. And I hope those who are not willing to put in the effort to learn can still enjoy the chaos. I apologize for the horrible music, there is definitely room for improvement on that front. I thought about leaving it out but ... I didn't.
Great job on level 8 ... but you could still do better. I have also played the levels after submitting and found that there are a lot more optimal solutions for the later levels. This is just a heads up for those who are interested. I'm looking forward to hearing your best results.