It's not exactly like that. When you cancel bullets with hyper shot, each bullet is added to the chain counter --> big points.
When you cancel lasers with hyper laser you get big stars, but they aren't added to the chain counter. There's a bonus at the end of the stage for stars (if you can clear it without dying) but my impression is that's not very important, scoring-wise. It's better to destroy the laser source with the hyper shot, so the laser will cancel into regular bullets and then into stars.
Judging by superplay videos, the best strategy would be to fill the hyper bar as soon as possibile, then activate the hyper in places where you can cancel a lot of bullets and repeat. But they don't wait for the screen to fill, there are some spots where you can stand still, shoot without killing the enemies and cancel a ton of bullets.
Besides that, there are a couple of little tricks: if you pick up a bee when it's green it will fill about 1/4 of your hyper bar, but when it's yellow it'll only give you points (and not much), if you kill enemies at point blank with laser in Bomb mode the hyper bar will fill faster, and I'm sure there's more.
The main problem for me is keep the chain after the hyper bar is filled. Normally if you drop the chain the counter will start to go down, but in less than a second you'll have some enemy to shot so it's not a big loss. But if you drop it during a hyper or when the hyper bar is full, it'll go straight to zero.
p.s. I'm talking about Bomb/Strong mode, Power is different.
It's easy, if you destroy the silos before the tanks hit them and have the hyper bar full you'll unlock the first midboss. After that, just don't die during the stage and pick up all the bees.
