Debut! John goes out of his WAY to give us a sequence from ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, TWO WAY RADIO, THREE WAY TIE, to … SIX WAYS TO SUNDAY? I thought long and hard about this one. I wondered, is 1, 2, 3, 6 a real sequence? It is cool that it describes the first perfect number, i.e. a number that equals the sum of its factors (1 + 2 + 3 = 6). Let's just go with that.
John's explanation of 1 + 2 + 3 = 6 does make sense, but I wish it had been more clearly spelled out somehow in the puzzle.
Nice gridwork, especially for a debut. It's hard to work in so much bonus material — WALLSAFE, PINGPONG, TOP SECRET (at the TOP of the grid!) and TREESTUMP with a funny beaver-related clue.
Usually, bonus fill is incorporated in the vertical direction, since this allows for more freedom and flexibility. TEABAGS and GET BUSY (admit it, you thought of the euphemism, didn't you? No? Oh. I didn't either.) are relatively easy to work into the grid, for example. Even though they each intersect two themers, there are a good number of black squares breaking things up in those regions. Easy peasy.
But look up at TOP SECRET. Stacking a long answer on top of a themer is not often done, because it forces so many sets of paired letters you have to work with: TO of STOP, ON of HONE, PE of OPEC, etc. It's true that you can put just about anything in that TOP SECRET slot, but you'll always have all those parallel constraints to work around. So it's great execution up there, what with nary a gluey bit.
The bottom does force the ugly EDUC, but what are you gonna do. It's the price of this sort of layout. Given that there were only a few other gluey bits in TYRE, OTRA, SEL, the overall result was pretty good.
The logic of the progression still doesn't sit quite right with me, but overall, I did like the gridwork execution. Neat to see a noob stretch to spruce up a grid like this, while still keeping all the short fill reasonably smooth.