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Thanks to encouragement from grandma and pootle (97 and 98) I have persevered with this and have now got a full grid and the first instruction from the letter pairs. However, I’m struggling with the final instructions from the extra letters from the order of grid entries - don’t seem to make sense! Any gentle help out there?

Diver,
If you got the instruction from the unchanged letters you might expect what sort of grid you want to begin with. The second instruction will enable you to get to that sort of initial grid.

Diver:

The message from the extra letters should be enumerated:

7 5 8 2 3 5 7
5 3 4

with apostrophes added where needed...

Worried I've bottled this thing somehow...

I have one unsolved clue (counting definitions without full wordplay as solved, anyway), and one unfilled space in the grid, pre-replacements.

The unsolved clue is "Taken by storm..." and the space to be filled is the most southeasterly 5-cell Down space, abutting the southern border. As far as I can tell, there is no word in Chambers that fits there with the crosses I have in the grid. But the entire rest of the grid is filled without conflicts, as far as I can tell. Is anyone able to determine from this how far off-track I am?

Sorry, please ignore my post! I had two crossing spaces swapped. All is well.

I was feeling confident about addressing the second part of the endgame when I posted #107 yesterday. Sheer hubris, punished by the gods who dwell on Mount Listener!
I slogged my way through putting the redundant letters into grid entry order, but I didn't have a skooby how to interpret what replaced the contents of most cells AND the second instruction.
Ater a frustratingly long time, I finally realised that I had made my usual mistake of writing down the wrong redundant letter — TWICE — once in both parts! I found the first in the two-letter word which unfortunately made it a verb instead of a preposition. Once amended, the penny dropped and I was able to forge ahead with the slog of replacement. This led to the message in the unreplaced cells, which in turn led me to amending what looked like a string of jumbled letters after the first word of the second instruction into two separate words.

After all this, I'm still not clear how "extending the second instruction" to the letters unreplaced gives the required result; surely it's simply the first word of the second instruction that should be applied? Is that correct, thus leaving the grid clear for what left some posters here "cold" and leading to the Marmite-effect mentioned above?

This is truly ludicrous, I can't believe this endgame! Incredibly impressive setting. I must say the bit between filling the original grid and getting to the final step (which I think I understand but have not yet executed—presumably we must follow the last instruction rigorously even if it means even more cell modification than it strictly indicates?) was extremely tedious. But I do at least understand why it was done this way, given how it ends up.

Having now completed it, I think I'm so delighted by the preposterousness of what the grid ends up looking like at the end that I'm ultimately positive on the puzzle as a whole. But it really did take me all week and I hope that isn't the case for the next one!

Look I know it’s getting late, but I’ve sat on this puzzle for two days after filling the grid and carrying out the first instruction.

The second instruction has me completely baffled. I have broken it into 7 words of length 7 5 8 2 3 5 7 which is apparently correct. I’ve been over the parsings again and I’m as confident as I can be each letter is correct. I have the words as noun, adjective, noun, verb, noun, noun, noun. The instruction implies that the things referred to by the first noun have a one-to-one link with the things referred to by the penultimate noun. Which is a nonsense. Isn’t it?

Am I making sense? Where have I gone wrong?

Hi louweed Your parsing is not quite right in my view. In the 7 5 8 2 3 5 7 sequence I have a preposition and possessive adjective for 2 3 !! Read post #79 of drxx . Three words (5 3 4) amount to the third task.
jif73 I totally agree with what you say in your second paragraph ! The preamble should read IMHO: " Those letters that do not get replaced say what solvers must do AFTER applying the first word of the second instruction to them in turn".