That must be a version I never downloaded. I'm wondering if you meant puzzle 5, in which case I would understand.
solidjim
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A member registered Jun 26, 2020
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Additional response as I hadn't actually noticed the second image in your link:
I think the ring has value and wouldn't like to bring about its removal - in addition to lending the final puzzle a striking aesthetic and making it look more daunting than it (perhaps) is, it acts as an initial distraction from the significance of the lower squiggle.
If you were going that route, is it feasible to instead re-jig the positioning on a couple of the words so the leftovers are visible? For example, supposing the first two rows were:
LANKOWREUYD CCUINGWNR
Perhaps not ideal due to the path taken by the first answer, but the first suggestion that came to mind...
Perhaps not WAS as this can be searched for and found in the grid & could become its own red herring. Having just the W would probably have worked for me, but I'm not sure if it could also be similarly misinterpreted.
It's currently the only puzzle where one of the leftover letters is hidden, so amending that might help (by that point I had come to assume this was one of the rules.)
I'm conscious that I'm just one person & a lot of players presumably got this without the nudge. On the other side of the coin, I figured out the letters and numbers in v1.12 without any need for the new hint. Is there a case for formalising the two-tier difficulty system introduced by having 1.12 & 1.13 both available?
(Re: the treehouses, I won't go into specifics as this isn't the venue for The Witness spoilers, but I mean the early puzzles allowing for an internally consistent yet incorrect understanding of the rules.)
Like one or two other commenters, I tripped up at the end with the interpretation of the final message. Is the note "Go back?" intended as a hint for this? If so, I mistook it as an instruction to revisit the previous puzzles and didn't give it any further thought at the end. It's unfortunate because at that point there are no more inroads to work at if you don't see the trick. I honestly don't know whether making the final clue make sense forwards would make this easier or harder (I started suspecting I'd made a mistake as it wasn't legible.)
Echoing the general praise for the game - the closest comparator I can think of is the treetops area in The Witness. Two separate laugh-out-loud moments of epiphany on puzzle 11. The first puzzle was the most difficult owing to a divergence of cultural knowledge, but that wasn't a showstopper.