Now “Roman” is an obscure word? Pffft!
It’s probably always capitalized?
Uh, I would never capitalize it (“Nariz romana” for example it’s never capitalized in Spanish), but a quick google shows that “Roman” is always capitalized, didn’t know that.
Another quirk of the English language learned! 
Yeah, German doesn’t capitalizes those things when they’re adjectives either.
Sorry for using the wrong terminology, but IMO there are, in fact, three levels of help at the Spelling Bee Buddy.
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The grids.
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The hints in the box labeled Your Customized Hints, which usually are just things you could have inferred from the grid, like “Good work finding 13 words that start with M! Keep looking, there are more to go.” But sometimes you get more helpful hints like, “Good work finding PART. Can you think of any other words that start with those letters?”
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The reader clues that you have to click on “Give me a reader clue” to see. They usually make the answer pretty obvious. For instance, last week, if you hadn’t figured out a four-letter word starting with AI, the reader clue was “Assistant.”
Those are the distinctions I was trying to make in my previous post.
I’ve always totally ignored that part of the Buddy. I think I may have tried it out the first time I opened the Buddy page and decided it was useless.
Yeah, it’s mostly useless, except for the kind of hint in my example.
Today was a tough road to Genius.
I got most all of it until the last few, where I had to go to comment hints by Steve.
I had a tough time too. I was one point away from G forever.
Yeah, usually it’s fairly easy to get to genius. Today it tooks some extra effort even though most of the words were common.
It wasn’t until later that I realized I had missed MORON. 
I’m not seeing how that would be helpful. Unless I’m mistaken, they mean “other words that start with PA”. Which the grid already tells you.
I’m afraid you are mistaken. It means just what it says: you will find PARTY or PARTIAL, or other words that start with PART.
Wow, clearly I had no idea.
Today (Monday) they had some rather extreme examples: “Good job finding MALARIA. Can you find any other words starting with those letters?” MALARIA
And MARINA / MARINARA
Female dogs are right out, but Bilbo Baggins is good.
What a strange omission. The NYT itself allows that word in multiple contexts.
Yeah, that was weird. I was surprised that it accepted it but I’ll take it.
Another slog for me today but a persevered for the G without a pangram although I think BIOETHIC would have been a good one.
Edit: I just found a pangram!
For a while, alfa wasn’t accepted, but then I think it was? Now it isn’t again. (Spoilered because it’s close to an accepted word).
It was allowed exactly once - this most recent February - and disallowed 66 times.
Sam: “Oopsie!”