This puzzle was slightly nerfed during testsolving. Originally you had to figure out the meaning of the {} symbol using a group of examples of it being applied to baskets of fruit. We also had a couple less given digits in the first section, and didn't have the hint connecting the first and second sections. Testsolvers succeeded and enjoyed the puzzle, but took like 2 hours to do so, which alas wasn't great for a 7-hour 26-puzzle hunt.
This puzzle was inspired by, of all things, trying to brute-force my way past a puzzle in the point-and-click adventure game Rhem III. We faced a tower of locked doors, each bearing a sequence of shapes and a code entry panel. We didn't know how to turn the shapes into inputs, but we did realize one of the shape sequences was highly symmetric, and tried calling in all codes with the same symmetries. Sadly it didn't work. But if it did, we could have used that information to tackle other doors with only one symmetry, and keep going until we solved them all...