POKE, PET, TAP, STROKE — all appropriate for a FINISHING TOUCH revealer, each word placed at the end of its theme phrase. Ross ...
read morePOKE, PET, TAP, STROKE — all appropriate for a FINISHING TOUCH revealer, each word placed at the end of its theme phrase. Ross disguised them well, making me happily fail in my early-week "Guess That Theme" game. The POKE in PIG IN A POKE is so far away from the "touch" meaning, for example. Every one of the four was so nicely obfuscated.

Interesting that Ross used across bonus fill again. The Jeff of today approves of the Ross of today's message to the Ross of yesteryear. Ghosts of puzzles past! (A shame that the queue time from acceptance to publication can be so long.)
Low word counts can be useful when they produce colorful, juicy fill. But ANNOTATORS and BROCAS AREA don't do much for me. The former is dry, and the latter is a toughie. I enjoyed reading up on BROCAS AREA, but I don't think it matches the simplicity of the theme.
The importance of matching fill to theme is something that's only dawned upon me in the past few years. A simple, beginners' theme + a crazy-hard fill can make for a dissonant solving experience, forcing someone to work so hard for too simple an a-ha. Along with BROCAS AREA there was GARRET and ESTADO, XTINA, UOMO, ITZA. All in all, it didn't make for a great early-week experience.
I appreciate the idea behind going down to 72 words in an early-week grid, as it can 1) give the constructor a personal challenge, and 2) have the potential of a fresh, yet still smooth, feeling. Yesterday's 72-word puzzle worked better on the second count than today's.
But overall, the theme was solid, putting a mist over my eyes until the very end. Along with some great long fill in NOT AGAIN, ROTOTILL, PATOIS, there were enough assets to still make for a decent solve.