I didn't have this game and am reading the rules for the first time, and yeah, there's some flaws that are limitations of the level of "technology" being employed. Ones that particularly struck me as odd are that a wrong guess automatically wins the round for the opponent, and that if a letter in the word is also used as a stopper it doesn't automatically get used as a good letter first.
Both of these are artifacts of having no MC. If you make a guess, you have to check to see if you're right; and if you're not, what are you going to do? You can't continue to play now that you know the answer. Either the word has to be ignored for scoring purposes, or it automatically goes to your opponent. And without an MC to tell you that the first K is in the puzzle but the second is a stopper, there's really no way around the stopper issue either. In fact, even if the game had employed an MC, I think they might have overlooked that rule for fear of complicating things.
I have the game and find it enjoyable enough even with the flaws (including the outsized bonuses and the near-meaninglessness of the Sprint). However, my number-six slide has for years had a tendency to fall to the middle position, prematurely revealing the letter under it, which is annoying enough during the main game but worse during the Sprint, where letters are supposed to be revealed in the given order.
