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Mooncow this parses into three sections. The first is an archaic word, and the second and third (one letter) should not be hard.

Many thanks! See it now. Obvious really :-) I'd missed the "before".

For the nine words, words one and two are fairly clear (but keep a copy before you do or you will end up shouting out the setter's name later!). I actually started on a fresh grid. You might want to print several off: there's a way to go yet. Words three and four mean colouring in some squares with a nice thick pen, after checking what various Greek letters look like in capital form. Words five six and seven reference yet another thematic item from the tenth extra, and you should by now be looking at one of them. This is where the preprinted numbers come in. You'll also need the penultimate sentence in the preamble at this point, and a bit of ingenuity, and candledave@127. When you've finished, use words eight and nine, and they select a set of ten words to make the next instructions. And they won't even be your last! This really is a layer cake of a puzzle. Or, as muraria@88 put it nicely, an escape room.

Thanks Mooncow for the hint. It looks as though I was right on hints 1 to 4 all the time. Whether your advice will kick me any further remains to be seen, but more would be inappropriate. I suspect this may end up as my first (non-arithmetic) miss for a long time. I imagine I’m not alone in that!

Thanks Candledave (136) and Mooncow (137). I now see where I was going wrong. I have the nine words, which appear to me to give four separate instructions of two, two, three and two words each. The two word instructions seem straightforward, but I have no idea what the three letter instruction means, although its last word and the shape both appear in the 8,6 previously referred to in this thread, which I presume is significant.

OptO - you have to solve that puzzle using the numbers in the grid

Yup, and a bit of ingenuity needed to get started, which a few comments here have already touched on.

In the endgame you need to do a number of the other types of thing that appear in the relevant section of the 8,6 -- so although having an 8,6 to hand is not essential, having a general idea of what appears in it and what the rules of them are does help. The first type of thing was nine of the thematic objects, which you used to get the nine words. The second type of thing is indeed named as the third word of the three-word third part of the nine word instructions. Applying the fourth part will give you the next instruction, which will set you up for two of yet another type of thing! (you may want to count up how many rows and columns there are at this point...)

It's a really convoluted but clever and interesting endgame, and well worth persevering through -- it gets easier to see what's intended as you get used to the vibe! If anyone doesn't finish it now, it's one that's worth returning to on a rainy day :-) I wonder how they will publish the solution -- if they only show the last grid, that misses out so much -- I got through four copies of the grid in total.

Thanks again Candledave and Mooncow. I am gradually getting there! I have carried out the first instruction, by printing a fresh grid. I originally carried out the second instruction by applying it to the cells containing only the letter in question. The result was unsatisfactory, so I have now applied it to all cells containing the relevant letter and the result is now symmetrical. I presume I have done the right thing, although the significance of the additional letters in cells eludes me for the moment. I presume that I now have to generate a (seventh word in the instruction) puzzle, but I cannot see how to allocate letters to numbers. The letters from the original grid-fill don't work, nor does A = 1, etc. Where do I go from here?

you have to make a few educated guesses to et going looking at the common numbers. The title is a hint towards one of the letter number combinations too

Thanks yet again Candledave. I think I understand the title, so I shall see where that leads me (tomorrow).

OptO. My way into this part of the puzzle was to guess that the Greek equivalent for one of the as yet unused letters in the grid would be there.
Kappa is a five letter word with a distinctive pattern of repeated letters.