There are people showing you can get 5-stars and completely AFK (like for 20 min). HERE
What prevents you from doing this now? The score is just to unlock layers 10-12, otherwise you can completely ignore it. If you’re happy exploring Layer 9 and taking a little longer to get your soul cinders (if you even care about that), then the score is totally meaningless to you. I suspect you will unlock layers by simply investing your Tower Knowledge in the Box of Many Things over time. Who cares if you couldn’t unlock a given layer in week 1?
Ignore the score (and its timer/empowerment/bonus objective elements) and Just have fun with it. The game play is unchanged, but it’s faster as there’s one less floor and if you die on the last boss its health does not reset. The fact that I can do this in 20-25 min instead of 40-45 min means I might do this just for fun, as I liked the game play loop, but I hated what a time-sink it was in 9.0 (completely avoided Twisting Corridors for that reason).
Scoring system needs significant changes, mainly with the so-called “bonuses (Of which you need at least a few to get a 4 star”.
No Epic - Changed to acquire 3 epics.
No Duplicate powers - Removed. Replaced with something to encourage large pulls, such as kill 10 mobs within 10 seconds of each other to help reward Tank/Healer solo players, who have been hit extremely hard by the changes.
Have 500 phantasma when killing last boss - Changed to acquire 1k phantasma throughout the run.
That’s the main ones really. Doing some QA so that things like Devil’s counting against completion, and being unable to access entire area’s of a floor due to closed/locked doors (Mainly in Skoldus and Forge) would be quite nice as well.
Blizzard, taking something and making it even worse. Meh.