oof what a mindfuck…
so initial foothold was pretty easy. Once I had c***** the user/pass was definitely guessable without brute… my first guess was about one off 
crafting the expoit took some time. The important part was getting feedback on what I was trying. Once I had that things moved quicker. Had to use some tricky phrase the likes I haven’t tried before
Root was easy as pie. Don’t fall into rabbit holes, no need to read a bunch of files like I did
overall I actually enjoyed it, learnt some different techniques as a result