25: balanced double pangram

kind of a late post, but new puzzle! taking my "balanced pangram" series up a notch: every vowel (AEIOU) appears exactly 7 times in this puzzle, and every other letter appears exactly twice. enjoy!

thoughts (warning: spoilers)

this was hell to put together. the key to a workable grid for one of these challenges is to have corners where several 3-letter words intersect, because those are the only places where you can reliably have a lot of filling options. i made it harder for myself with a rather arbitrary stylistic constraint: i don't like when one section is only connected to the rest of the grid via a single word, so i avoided that, even though it would've made the construction easier. i tried out a few different grid shapes/layouts, but eventually settled on this one due to its favorable corner setup.

it took me several attempts to fill this grid---my first few tries ended up with unworkable sets of letters towards the end. for what would ultimately be my successful attempt, i started with QUIZZICAL, and more or less filled in the grid from left to right. i left gaps in certain places that allowed for multiple possibilities: the intersection of TIC and ZIP, which could have been A/E/I, and the EM of EMU, which could have also been YO). eventually i got to the following point:

the remaining letters at this point were EFGIMOY, which seemed fairly promising, especially since there were still two solid options in the top left corner, but i couldn't get it to work. the breakthrough was replacing the I in UIE/IIN (as in "pull a uie" and "there's no i in team", respectively) with a G to get UGE/IGN. (admittedly, the former is kind of a bad entry, as it's a far less common spelling than "yuge", but at this point i was willing to take whatever i could get.) from there, i was able to finish with no trouble.

in retrospect, i don't think i clued this one very well. it ended up being easy except for a few annoying "either you know it or you don't" clues that probably did in a lot of solvers. i should have used an easier clue for DIY, given the trickiness of the crosses, and maybe put an extra hint for KUZCO, something like "Emperor ___" (Disney character whose name sounds like an Inca city). live and learn, i guess!