Shortening eighth note beamed stems and other typesetting questions

[Knute Snortum]

Hi, everyone.  This will probably be a long post.  I hope you will bear with me.

I have two questions: one as experts in LilyPond and one that just has
to do with typesetting, but they are related.

First, I am trying to shorten the stems of beamed eighth notes.  I
found that Stem.details.beamed-lengths could do that, but it seems to
have minimums that it won't go past. Consider this snippet:

%%% Start
\version "2.22.1"

\relative {
  \override Stem.details.beamed-lengths = #'(2)
  c''8 c c c
  \override Stem.details.beamed-lengths = #'(3)
  c b a g |
  \override Stem.details.beamed-lengths = #'(3)
  c a f d
}
%%% End

I can't get the repeated "c" eighth notes lower than 2 or the
descending eighth notes lower than 3. Is there a way to get past these
minimums? Or am I doing something wrong?

Now the typesetting question: I have a piano piece that has several
voices and there is a run of descending eighth notes inside of other
voices that gets really cramped. Attached is a screenshot of how some
older editions dealt with it (old-edition-solution.png). It requires
shortening the eighth note beam down to almost nothing.

Here is how the two measures look without any intervention
(eighth-note-stems-without-intervention.ly produces
lilypond-solution.png). It's an interesting solution, but I don't
think it will work.

And here is my solution (eighth-note-stems-my-solution.ly produces
my-solution.png). Is it readable? Should I try to make it look like
the old edition? If so, how?

Thanks for reading this to the end.

--
Knute Snortum

old-edition-solution.png
Description: PNG image

eighth-note-stems-without-intervention.ly
Description: Text Data

lilypond-solution.png
Description: PNG image

eighth-note-stems-my-solution.ly
Description: Text Data

my-solution.png
Description: PNG image