Really neat solution. As seems to happen with me weirdly often, I managed to do all of the hard optimization before the easy parts, and cut the last 6 at once by just **********************************************************************. This was a cool level though, the optimization was enjoyable to work out.
This level was amazing! It was a cool theme, but more importantly, it was really fun to optimize! Those last 2 steps that RisingStar111 found were brutal, but it totally makes sense.