Great post, @Brand_S! Some funny stuff in there, too, as well as informative and inspirational! 
I might not be understanding the situation you’re describing correctly, but if I am then there’s a setting in the Settings > App section called “Lesson ordering”. If you set it to “Ascending level then shuffled”, then you get vocab, kanji, and radicals all in a random order but earlier-level items always come before later-level items (when doing new lessons, review ordering remains the usual SRS ordering).
Effectively what this means is that when you level up you get a mix of all the new vocab mixed in with all the new kanji and radicals. Therefore, you end up whittling down that pile of vocab as you go through the level. It also means that your kanji and radicals are more spread out, so you don’t have to do a whole bunch at once. Personally, I find that it makes the pacing of the whole site much more ‘steady’ rather than ‘up and down’. And I never end up with a huge pile of vocab at the end of one level (or, equivalently, at the beginning of the next level).
One possible ‘drawback’ of this setting is that you won’t be able to do a ‘speed run’ of WK using this pacing. Instead, things are more ‘spread out’. But personally – having previously tried to speed through WK and subsequently having to reset when things got overwhelming – I much prefer this more steady pace. So it’s not really a drawback for me, it’s more like a ‘feature’. 
I wrote more about this feature, in more detail, here: