Eg: I'm Australian and instantly thought "that'd be a paring knife ..", and yes, that appears to be what it is.

Someone who reads is a reader, viewer, writer, dancer, God loves a tryer, and someone who pares should be a parer.

Although I often try that pattern and have it denied, if you can shelve a project it suggests shelver which is in, if you can table a motion it suggests tabler which isn’t.

so any borrowed word from a non-Latin alphabet is a romanization, that's not a sane criterion (κριτήριον)

Of all the 'weird' two letter words mentioned, I'd consider qi probably the most reasonable and common, and certainly one that I actually hear used

A brand name, yes, but from an actual word.

[0] Anybody else here remember being both very excited about, and then very disappointed by, the Adam?

My experience having briefly gotten into competitive scrabble 15 years ago is that memorizing the short words is the price of admission for a more fun game. Knowing the short words makes it possible to fit the long words on the board.

instead of "za" I would suggest "ze" as a pronoun for a non-binary person

As suggested elsewhere, we play with a two letter cheat sheet to make the game more fun for those that don't know all those words.

Thinking about whether something is a likely answer also introduces some strategy itself.

In spite of being something of a professional writer, I don't usually like word games (including Scrabble) much. But I do like Wordle--although I quickly tired of the multiple word variants.

But the important thing was to state the meaning before looking up the word, not just using the reference list to pick out combinations that work with your letters. It being a real word did not count if you didn't understand the word.

This wouldn't work as well for online gaming, I expect. And of course you can game it by memorising the meanings of some obscure words, but that (expanded vocab) was part of the point.