I have also hacked around on solving this problem. However, I decided that using the shorter list of answers was cheating, since end users wouldn't have access to this list. From a user's perspective, any word that Wordle lets you guess could be a valid solution.

It's still a work in progress, but my code died when I tried to generate a complete game tree for the full list.

However, in theory it could be done once, to determine the best starting word, and then hardcoded to always use the same start word. So, my plan to explore a game tree approach from guess 2.