Boodles

The answer for 1 Down, "Bad Thing", is probably the clunkiest NYT crossword puzzle answer I've seen.

I call foul on 42 down. Something being "evener" than something else does not make it "level, essentially".

"ERM" is NOT an answer for "Sound of hesitation". I call foul.

Three fouls come to mind immediately. For the answer "Phenom", the clue needs to be "Prodigy, in slang" not just "Prodigy". "End" is not a valid answer for "Lit part of (a cig)", because the end in your mouth is decidedly NOT lit. And no one on earth, being surrounded, has ever said they're "Hedged in".

Can anyone tell me how "tut" is the sound of a dental click?

There's something about this puzzle that I don't understand. I figured out the trick, viz., leave out "es" in the four places where it is appropriate, and solved the rest of the puzzle correctly. However, I filled in the last empty square I didn't get the "solved" screen. I studied the puzzle for a good while, and finding nothing I could change, I gave up and clicked on "reveal puzzle". At that point I heard the ditty of success that goes with a solve. Looking at the puzzle at that point I saw that it showed "esc" in each of the squares where the trick lay. What I don't get is why did I only get to the "solved" screen when I hit "reveal", and not when I filled the puzzle? I didn't change anything from my original fill.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. As a relatively new puzzler, I have a question. When a solution requires a word in a square, such as today's "smoke" or "hay", how do you enter that in the box? Thanks all.