After a few more plays, I think the player could have benefitted from being a lot faster (either from unnormalized diagonals or just faster overall), noticing that if I’m not losing medals to areas locked off by a bomb, I’m losing them from being too slow to keep up with them.
The gravity applied to medals is also a bit much, especially if the medal is spawned high and flies above the screen, meaning once they finally come back into view they are moving crazy fast.
Oddly enough I’m now also having trouble replicating my 700k score from before despite maintaining a 128x medal chain until the last few waves with the repeated 4 large enemies and clearing with lives in stock, often getting anywhere from 300k-500k instead.