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Muraria, the penultimate grid is NOT overwritten!! It's rearranged.

I think you're simply indulging in semantics, madamearcati - the penultimate grid must be overwritten because it already contains printed letters.
In fact the endgame could have been guessed at and completed without doing any sums at all.

drxx, not semantics. The puzzle as originally submitted did not include the eight synonyms but required solvers to rearrange the letters in grid E to create a word square. Unfortunately, test-solvers found that too difficult, so the eight synonyms were added. You appear to have managed to use those to short-cut the process, thereby missing the need for rearrangement. Perhaps it would have been better to just add synonyms for, say, four of the final grid's words.

How can I circumvent a process that isn't part of the puzzle? Present the puzzle another way and I'll attempt to solve it that way.

As I mentioned earlier, once the synonym containing the initial letters of the other seven is found, it's 'game over' - why would anyone want to complicate it further? And if I hadn't guessed (correctly, as it happens) that I could halve the awful tedium of the sums, I wouldn't have bothered with the endgame at all.

It's too late now to think about adjusting the level of difficulty for the puzzle.

I am four square with drxx on this. I completed the puzzle in exactly the same way, and I imagine so did many others, so if that amendment was made, it was a pretty daft one.

I think the puzzle would have been borderline insoluble without any guidance as to the new words to be formed (Alexa, make eight eight-letter words in Chambers using only these 64 letters) and there was no mention of the word “rearrangement”.

I sense you have some “skin in the game”, madamearcati, but you may be forgetting that we only have the information printed in the puzzle to guide how we solve it.

I'm 'foursquare' (sorry!) with you both on this quisling and drxx.

The synonyms provide a fairly straightforward path of least resistance to what would have otherwise been a nigh impossible task.

Quisling and Muraria, many thanks for your well-worded comments, which have been passed on. Is either of you a setter? One of the nice things about setting puzzles for the Listener is getting constructive and supportive feedback from other setters - something which is sometimes lacking here! Given that removing all synonyms might have made the puzzle well nigh insoluble, while providing all eight synonyms allowed the intended final re-arrangement to be totally by-passed, how do you think the puzzle might have been improved to force solvers to make the rearrangement? Mention requirement for rearrangement while giving a synonym for the first eight-letter word? Or something else?
Once again, thanks for your feedback.

That’s a good and fair question, madamearcati. Even the NW-SE diagonal was less helpful than it might be, because one only knows 6 of the 8 letters, in some order, as an odd number of them appears in the final grid. The repeated O complicates that. So I’ll think about how the “rearrangement” could be signalled so that the whole solving process can be completed, and get back to you.

I should add that I enjoyed the puzzle a great deal, and appreciated all the work that had clearly gone into its compilation. Sadly I’m not a setter, just one of Banjo Patterson’s “Riders In The Stand”.

Hello madamearcati,
I think the puzzle as a whole is a brilliant construction and as I said @post 13 it must have take Arcadia a good while to put together.
I will leave it to quisling and others to get back to you on your request.
The only thought I had was whether, instead of synonyms scattered through the clues to grids A to D, there could have been a separate set of cryptic clues or allusions to the 8 rearranged grid E entries, under grid E. Easier said than done of course but one idea would be split each of the 8-letter words into 2x4, provide clues to each 4-letter word (or non-word) and then ask solvers to rearrange correctly in the final grid. Or something on those lines, to make the final grid a 'solvable challenge'.
Have a lovely Christmas...