If you finish the 2nd quest with all 16 hearts, it goes to the 4th instead of the 3rd. And if you beat the 3rd without dying, you jump to the 5th. The idea was to select quests more appropriate to how you play. Do a lot of exploration, you go to the exploration-heavy quest; beat the hard one easily, you skip the easier one.

I don't think any places where you can get stuck would have been fixed. There are one or two places in the NES quests where it's possible, so it probably would be considered acceptable.