The old tree system was much better, it allowed you to mix exercises from different topics. The new path system locks you into one topic until you know all the sentences by rote.

The main objective is not to complete lessons, but to learn. If you use up all your hearts because you make too many mistakes you’re obviously not learning. At that point Duolingo completely fails though, instead of telling you to go back and practice, it asks if you want to buy hearts with in-game currency or switch to the paid super max hyper ultra AI whatever it’s now called for unlimited hearts. Unlimited hearts doesn’t give you shit though, it allows you to bruteforce your way through the lessons to get XP to rank up in the completely optional leaderboards, it doesn’t help you learn. It’s only pay to win if you see it as a game and not as a language learning app.

You can set your profile to private to completely disable the leaderboard stuff.

This, it would be interesting to extend this special status and have a different guest country every year.

It’s technically not countries participating, but broadcasters and they need to be independent of state control. The russian broadcasters were not kicked out for the russian invasion of Ukraine, but for being state controlled. They were accused of this for a long time and the invasion was the final straw.