I think the way it’s respectful of the player’s time was the right way to go, not requiring a complete restart after each mistake. As it is, each bounce up and down the play field requires a tiny bit of new strategy for success and there’s a nice natural progression of each ‘level’ being longer than the previous simply by virtue of passing through the previous run’s middle space. There’s something clever to be noted there, but I’m not sure how best to phrase it, something about the spatialization of level progression I guess, like the play space itself is a progress bar expanding in both directions. (Of course, you could say practically the same about any linear game, but its the backtracking that lets you see that growth.)