George, I'd say after about level 6 I knew I'd have a good chance to KS this game (assuming the KS was on 22-1, which I wasn't 100% sure of), since I finally realized 2 important things:
1) Only 2 fireballs ever come out on the Conveyor Stage, therefore this increases your chances for a free pass significantly! It also makes any other situation very easy to survive. A screwing on this board would have to be basically the epitome of bad luck. Since usually most of my deaths on normal DK are on the Conveyor stage, this helped me, specifically, even more. I also made sure during the first few of these boards to notice when the conveyor changes as well as if there was anything with the top conveyors that was different (like fast pies, like in Crazy Kong). There likely is a difference (I noticed in some cases several pies come out in quick succession, but not close enough to one another to make them impassible), but I didn't nail down any specifics. I did notice that if you get caught on the top of the retracting ladder as it detracts, you can be high enough on it to be in considerable risk of being hit by a fireball up top. I also noticed that if you retreat in this case you actually 'glitch' or 'slide' down the ladder significantly; so much so that you may risk hitting a pie below -so be careful of this too.
2) The springs on the elevators are grouped into pairs of two close springs. This makes the hardest level of springs virtually as easy as the springs on level 3 of normal DK. As long as you make your move for the ladder on a long, second spring, and with an ok 'jump', you will never die. You can even go for the ladder on a medium spring (if I remember correctly) with a great 'jump' and you can barely clear the longest spring. I cleared most of these boards with about a spring's width of room for safety -which is a ton! Essentially, if you take your time on this board, you ought to never die as well.
I hope these tips help. These are basically the most important things I figured out. The only other small thing I learned was from the way I died on the rivets trying to grab the bottom hammer with a standing jump -yeah, maybe don't do that...you need to be much closer to the edge then on normal DK, so it is risky, but it can be learned, I'm sure.
Like I said, this was basically no-hammers accept for on rivets (p.s. I knew about the invisible nature of the top rivet hammer already from Crazy Kong, so I did use that one still!). I never grabbed the hammers on the barrel screen (except for after I died on the KS for the first time, I grabbed the hammer on my next two lives), and I think I grabbed the bottom hammer on 1 conveyor screen because I didn't have the free pass and there were more pies on the screen than usual.
Edit: One other thing I remember was about fireballs: I'm not sure if they tend toward the right like in normal DK. I've heard mention that some players think this is the case with Crazy Kong, so maybe it is true of this one as well. I had a couple tough rivet boards that I barely survived that made me think this was the case, because I was trying to wait out a fireball on the top-left side.
