I liked being able to place as I go to see where I needed to make more space. It'd be nice to have unlimited undo though, at least for an easy mode. There's already a lot of possible combinations, so it was already tricky to find the right combination to make the right shapes. Sometimes I'd just find I screwed up like 5 pieces ago. I'm not sure the purpose of the ingredients stacking and why dragging them as a stack was important though?
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Originally, the ingredients stacked neatly in the top left corner to keep the screen tidy, and to give me flexibility if I ever decided to add more items or shrink the board area. Dragging an entire stack made complete sense alongside that setup. I eventually changed my mind and decided to spread the ingredients out to fill all that empty space, but I saw no reason to remove stack dragging.
To keep things fair, there's secretly a next piece director trying to minimise the amount of wasted item area. For performance reasons, it doesn't always find the absolute best solution. But as long as you build flat, there should usually be a solution when you reach the final queued pieces. That's from my own testing rather than any mathematical proof.
I think it's fine to reach an unsolvable state occasionally and just try your best to minimise the damage. Having a single undo is usually enough to prevent the frustration of a misdrop or the sudden realisation that a better spot was available. Paired with the generous lookahead and the piece director, I think the game is easy enough to finish. Though not necessarily with full stars.
Thanks for your comment, I really appreciate it!