One thing I find odd about the rules: it forces you to respect what you've learned via green or yellow tiles, but not gray tiles. The spirit of the rules suggests once you've learned a letter is not in the word, you shouldn't be able to reuse that letter. Perhaps that would simply make the game too difficult, though.

It didn't let me guess things that had already been eliminated with gray tiles.

It does - you can type them but it rejects the word when you submit it.

I think this DOES make it way harder than regular wordle.

Isn't that rule 3?