am i dumb how do i get past the first little ledge

You don't, you just cheese the level by slamming into the wall just to the left at the start and skip most of the course.

The ball appears to go high enough but it [control] doesn't like that it went over space. So the best one could do was put it (after +1s) into the port.

Same here, got stuck in an infinite loop of the booster pad (?) sending slamming me into the wall over and over.

i fucked up the random seed and it generated a bunk level, its fixed now sorry

lol same