Interesting, it took me a while looking at your images to figure out why the original design didn’t work. The problem was that there was no solution that could avoid at least one extremely long bridge, and that bridge also forced the adjacent bridges to be “wrong” (though maybe if it printed the super long bridges first, it could’ve made the rest short).

I don’t have much to add besides being surprised the problem was more interesting than it first seemed…and I don’t accept that you were being an idiot because it want immediately obvious to me either. Or I am one too :)

What about printing it in two halves the each have a flat bottom? Since the optical quality doesn’t matter, the line down the middle of the lens won’t matter.