Hey, thanks for the lenghty review, though most of these things are intentional design decisions.
The element tree is split between idle (fire/stone) and active (lightning/ice) elements, encouraging mixing, for example using fire to smash ice. It's not meant to be fully purchasable. I will look into having stone being more on par with fire though.
Not planning on having an auto smasher for big objects, since the point of idling is to earn less, and you can get a good chunk of big objects with the elements anyway, but.
This game is primarily on mobile, so it's designed around more active play with idle kept in mind.
For the third region, yeah, they're not very useful yet since there aren't enough upgrades, they are more used to slow down the objects and then smashing them with the elements, but yeah there'll be a x1.5 damage upgrade.
The bottle/plate/combo/mug upgrade is not meant to be completed fast or farmed, it's more like a reward for those who play really idle or just achieved after some time.
Partly agree with the menu clicking comment, there's auto buyers coming in the next update and overall future upgrades should require you to check the shop less. Just adding a general buy max button wouldn't really work since that'd just make the player not look at what they're buying and some upgrades are more useful than others.
There's a background dim setting and a setting for changing the smash text color - see if that helps.
Editing this because I thought more about the mission - will update it so it's a bit faster.