Well then, I guess struct was good to go. Amazing how something as simply taking an approach to pack and unpack the data allowed me to reduce the runtime below 10 seconds on all 27 test cases.

To compare the results. I went from 7.31 seconds on the last good test case with the previous code to over 10 seconds to fail the rest of the test cases.

Using your suggestion, I was able to solve all the test cases under 10 seconds, with the longest running time 8.39 seconds.

😀