Author here, happy to answer questions about any part of this. The scoring weights are hand-tuned from playtesting, not learned from data. Would love to hear from anyone with psychometrics or spatial cognition experience.
you are right, and that has been bugging me from the start and never got to fixing it. I tweaked it a bit to make it hopefully make much more sense now. Also I didn't know enclose.horse, and loved playing it, so thanks for pointing it out and for the nice feedback.
You are definitely correct, and that is how I am solving all the puzzles as well. However, I've encountered many people that couldn't wrap their head around even the mirror across the fold line logic. For such people, the techniques I described help to come up with puzzles that feel "hard" for them. Thanks for giving it a try.
Advice. Make the scoring more like http://enclose.horse/
Score should be correct out of incorrect but medals for perfect, almost perfect, and some cutoff above.
I missed one fold on the hard one (but 3 points due to this), and only 1 star feels a little harsh to me.
In reverse order of the folds, just mirror all holes across the fold line.
https://icfpc2016.blogspot.com/2016/08/pdf-for-task-descript...