Everyone should play this hack. It has 16 colors of Yoshis.

Midway through Sakura Village.  I'm really enjoying the new bonus houses, although I haven't bought anything at the shops.  Is it just me, or is Newer somehow more generous with 1-ups than retail NSMBW?  I hit 99 lives without a 1-up trick by midway through world 3.

I assume you're done by now... I'm working on editing my remaining videos right now to upload sporadically over the next week.

Well, I finished the whole game on Hard Mode today; the difficulty curve was surprisingly static for the first seven worlds, with the change in my number of lives being largely based on individual levels rather than a general increase in difficulty.  At least until the latter half of World 7; I started losing lives like crazy right near the end of World 7 and eventually got a Game Over in 8-1 or 8-2, with several continues afterwards.  World 9 in particular wasn't nearly as easy to 100%, especially without extra players, and the whole game felt fresher the second time around. 

As a side note, I kind of wish I hadn't found out the actual way to get the first coin in 9-5 and the third(?) in 9-7; finding out about the latter was especially disappointing, after perfecting that crazy jump off of the falling Monty Moles.