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I think I understand the preamble and what needs to happen but making very slow progress so far. Any hints appreciated.

Took me a while t get the hang of the letters swaps, e.g. if the clue answer is RATE and the letter it passes down is the E, then the grid entry can be ?RAT, R?AT, RA?T, or RAT? where ? is the letter received from above.

Thanks Buddy, the clues are just so hard! Trying to get down clues in as much as possible.

I found this quite a workout. To end with real words after the letter changes is a feat.
One tip I would give is to look carefully at some words which one might assume to be link words.

Help! Does each across answer have TWO changes, or just ONE? I'm baffled after 2 hours.

Lumen, each across answer has 2 changes. In some entries the incoming letter takes the place of the outgoing one, but in others it goes elsewhere in the original word.

Thanks as ever for your advice!

It has two changes. A letter moved in from the previous across, and a letter moved out to the next one.

I’ll give one example to start you off. For 27a, the wordplay leads to WOO + LP + SACK*. An F is added from 25a, and an O moves into 30a, leaving a new word as the answer.

This is a tricky puzzle, to be sure. No shortcuts, and the spelling of the theme doesn’t help much until you have a pretty full grid.

Hope that’s not too much information

No, that's great thanks. I was pretty much there with that one. But the four-letter ones will be a real challenge?

I tried to choose a clue with more straightforward wordplay! Yes, the shorter words are harder, and until you know which letters get passed on it’s hard to be confident. So nailing the down clues is the obvious starting step, as none of those letters will change. But they are far from easy.