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I agree. There are a few Listeners in the past that I have found as tough as this, but when I did get to the end eventually, I was sure of my solution. Here, I think the preamble is very unclear and ambiguous about the last bit of the endgame. I can only guess at what is meant by "synonyms of the usual ones." It's not even very clear what "descriptions" signifies.

Good grief, what a monster. I have done far less work today than I should have but at least I've finished the crossword! I have discovered that I am very bad at drawing rings but hopefully will not be docked marks for this.

Finally over the line. Struggled a bit with the final “diagram”.
Clever construction, exceedingly difficult. Preamble only made sense after completion. No fan of these characters, so no cigar Enigmatist. 😉

ok, I’m finding the preamble utterly bewildering. I enjoy wrestling with the puzzle, but not wrestling with poorly thought-out rubric :-(

I really don’t want to look for answers yet, so can anyone who’s cracked this give the gentlest of hints to help me unpick enough of the preamble to get into the puzzle please?

* Following from piffleworthy’s question, if some of the down clues have different lengths than their grid entries, how can we ever construct the grid? And where in the preamble does it tell us that the grid entries are not just the clue answers?

* What’s the difference between “letters are ignored in their clues’ wordplay” and “the wordplay gives an extra letter that is not entered”?

Mooncow - the numbers in brackets is the number of letters in the answer. Some letters are larger than life so it does not mean the length of the entry is the same as the number of letters.
There are 24 letters in the grid that are ignored in their clues. Some clues may ignore more than one, some may be ignored by more than one clue.

Brilliantly clear! You don’t fancy signing on as preamble reviewer?! Thanks smithsax. I’m still struggling with the clues, but that’s normal :-)

Well it has taken me all week but that was possibly the finest Listener I've ever done I think. Brilliant construction, slow but steady progress through about 5 pdms. Superb, thanks enigmatist.

Agree completely SH.

I am ambivalent towards this puzzle: I thought the main solve was unnecessarily difficult, but the endgame was terrific.

I enjoy carte blanche, but am a below-average cold solver so find clashes tricky. Those clashes, combined with the esoteric entry-filling mechanism in some clues, sapped a lot of the fun out of the carte blanche -- and the clues themselves were on the harder side for me, even before the possibility of (multiple) unindicated letters. For the first time ever I skimmed the answer thread here to look for hints on some of the difficult clues. (I do wish the Chambers app had a reverse lookup feature where I could enter "Spenser" or "Scot"; the CD-ROM version seems very hard to get hold of.)

The preamble made sense in the end -- a lot of its trickiness was in the complexity of what it described. But I must say "24 letters are ignored in their clues' wordplay" is very easy to misunderstand as the opposite of what it actually means; a strict parsing of the preamble suggests it's fair, but it was yet another obstacle to me.

The endgame itself though was delightful, and yet another astonishingly clever piece of construction. Once I'd hit an (abnormally high, I think) critical mass of solved clues, the real fun began -- and this was difficult too, but in a way I thoroughly enjoyed. And it was nice to have thematic material I recognised.

So I'm here to both vent my frustration over something that seemed overly punishing (I think I resent it more because I recently calculated each Listener costs me £6 thanks to the Times' one-size-fits-all digital subscription, which has left me grumbling) -- and also to express much admiration for a superb endgame.

That is by a head the toughest listener I’ve finished, and I just limped across the finish line this evening. Actually, that’s not quite true: I charged across the finish line the evening, because as I got about half-way through the grid fill the fog was clearing and the remaining opaque bits of preamble started to fit into place, so the endgame was far less painful than some of the earlier solving.

I agree with sh, but also with smst. The sheer amount of cold solving required was tough, especially as the clues were unbending. And a barless grid can be fun but when you don’t know what needs to happen to the down clues to enter them there is very little to go on to start the grid fill! I never did really figure out how to deduce the grid fill, and in the end just made a few lucky guesses and gradually saw how it was working out. The one bit that really felled me was then a couple of down clues where only two letters of a 7- or 9-letter word were provided by the wordplay — though ironically it was those same entries that clicked the theme for me! I confess I went to the other thread for some help on some of the down clues, but in the end the information that some of those down clues had so many of their letters unspecified was the only additional hint I really needed.

It’s an awesome grid, and a very enjoyable puzzle. I think a little more care to make the preamble a little less bewildering could have reduced the all-round frustration a bit without losing any of the genuine challenge of a satisfyingly demanding solve.