Justin Lim's construction is a wow. Will be interested to see whether Rex agrees...
Went through it pretty smoothly by my deliberate standards...wanted PIECE OF FICTION at first...got the sense fairly soon there were lots of high-value letters, which probably helped me come up with HAND AXE to get the SE going...had CASKS instead of RACKS in the SW, which I had more trouble with than the rest of the puzzle...
The less than stellar though perfectly good features: The theme could be from any time in the last umpty years. You can quibble about the SON, TIN, LIP, and FIN clues containing a piece of the answer...agree w/ Justin and Will in that cluing it that way has a lot more zip than "wrestling score," etc., but there is a real if minor infelicity in having three answer letters in the clues.
Now, the cool stuff: This puzzle if published in my Maleskan era would have stood out like a few square miles of the high Rockies dropped down into the Appalachians. There's no J and one G, but every other letter including Q and Z appears at least twice. All that crunchiness is combined with a pretty dense theme, good word count (74), good black square count (34), strong short and semi-short fill (yay for PSY, SWF, BROZ, OMSK, VOLVO, PSHAW), and good to great long non-thematic answers (cheers and double cheers for AVENUE Q, SPAMALOT, SQUEEGEE, and HARDCORE).
Yes, wow.
So how about Rex? He's upbeat about the fill, though "pretty accomplished" is a calmer description of the construction than mine. I like his analysis of thematic looseness and how SEMI and HALF are precise dividers and PIECE and PARTIAL are not...I suppose you could go all the way with fractions and have, say, QUARTER MILE = E and ONE-THIRD ILL-FED = ED. Yes, EXALLY without the hyphen looks foolish and BROZ for all that I liked it could be part of a Slavic infomercial for male support garments.
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