I was referring to your CB comments on how long it took to do the data presented in the puzzle. Your regex brute-force solution is extremely fast in comparison to my brute-force approach. Mine involves generating all possible subsequence of the shortest string in descending order according to length and testing each one on the remaining strings.

I've been improving myne too.

I am not sure if you meant that I was improving mine and you were improving yours too or if you meant that my characterization of yours was based off an old version. If the former, I haven't been improving my own. I am completely amazed at how fast it runs. I was only building a brute-force approach to verify that it was actually correct.

I am still hoping someone more knowledgeable than myself can answer some or all of the questions I posed at the end of the meditation.