Thank you for playing and for such lovely comments! I shall pass them on to the rest of the team :) I'm glad you loved the baby hermits as much as we do!
The cooldowns are in place to encourage players to interact with the rest of the board, and move between the Coral and the Treasure Chest. Taking inspiration from classic merge game mechanics, including board management and associated degrees of challenge, we wanted to strike a balance between that and maintaining an overall relaxing / cosy experience (to provide some challenge, but nothing too difficult). I do understand where you're coming from - the spawn rates and cooldown times are what we settled on, in the given timeframe! :D