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@oddjobbob and Formannen:
I am confused by your argument #1, but regarding #2, it is quite easy to understand: the pencil fill feature is unnecessary for Easy difficulty, whereas it is beneficial for Extreme. But it takes a toll on your total time, simply by the sheer amount of cell presses itt requires. I am unable to complete the fill process under a minute in any puzzle, so using this technique rules me out of Easy scores. The skill required to solve a difficult puzzle with a complete and exact pencil fill is very different from that of solving an easy puzzle with no pencil fill at all.
In my case, my best time for extreme is 2:03 for Extreme and 2:01 for Hard, the two categories where I use pencil. I guess my lowest limit for a complete pencill fill + solve process is about 2 minutes regardless of the puzzle's difficulty (that's several cells per second), but it is possible to reduce this by skipping the pencils when the results are obvious, as in Easy puzzles where my best time is slightly above 1 minute. So there: I am mediocre (moron?) at Easy, and much better at Extreme 
More generally, I see that scores are quite consistent day after day, with the same players scoring the same ranks. I doubt that cheating happens significantly at all. I mean, why cheat your way to the top 20? If you're going to cheat, why upload a score of 2:24 on Extreme, and not, say, 0:08? Since nobody really cares about an obscure leaderboard in an obscure forum, why would hundreds of people take turn to upload every day cheated scores nicely spread between 2 and 3 minutes, EVERY DAY, FOR YEARS?
1 minute may be a bit lucky, but I have no reason to believe it's fake. 2 minutes is definitely common, hundreds of players can do that.
That or there is a secret forum somewhere where hidden plotters gather from all time zones to take turn and upload the leaderboard constantly with the same performance profile, with a fine dosage between excellent and lousy scores, just to bruise your ego  .
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The version currently available on the Amazon appstore seems way behind the Android appstore one.
Are there porting issues between the two systems?
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I started this game a couple of months ago. My first attempts were in the 10+ minutes range. Then I used the "digit first", as well as other display settings. Times went down to 5 minutes or less, but still above 4. I thought 3 minutes was very difficult. I did today twice under 3 minutes, with my new record at 2:40. So it seems to me that practice is all that you need: I am exactly the same person as two weeks ago, but now I always reach the top 100 score, whereas I rarely did then. I will certainly get tired of this game, the leaderboard will roll, you will join it, and then move on.
Our grandparents used to consider crossword puzzles as the perfect example of pointless exercise, but we have Sudoku 
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