Yea, my advice if you were going for high scores is to learn all the secrets so you can eventually put all of it together. The game expects a lot from the player: memorize location of secret levels, destroy hidden beacons, powerup boxes, humans and secret humans, visitors, killing disruptors. It's a lot to manage so I can see why people might get frustrated. Master just takes it to 11 because of the revenge bullets. Hero turns it to a 15 though lol.
In regards to Smartbomb, I think that's the choice of players on Master because it gives you some added protection. There's no charge time compared to Powershot, which is a little harder to use in Master.
Going back to high scores, also learn the locations of Multiplier tokens and extra lives. After you have 5 lives, every extra life token you find after is actually a multiplier token.
Many different layers of getting a high score. If you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask!
Like you, all this talk has made me want to play Master as well, lol. I haven't put nearly enough time into it compared to Veteran though.
My hope for Returnal (and this is coming from someone who enjoys the high score chase) is that they have some underlying mechanics like Nex or even Resogun to climb whatever leaderboards they might potentially have.
