Hiya, thank you very much for playing our game and commenting! Yes, I'm afraid we have fallen for the classic first jam blunder and made the game a tad challenging. As for your points:
The design was intended to encourage you to stay in your area but use the close range attacks when enemies come to you or then build up a boost and risk the small damage to hit them in their area (you can also block 1 tick with your shield).
Very late playtesting showed the Gator enemy to be quite challenging (it's actually been nerfed already), I'm sorry! But it's quite predictable and will always teleport to you at fixed intervals which allows you to counter attack with your close ranged attacks.
If you haven't had a look at the tutorial (you can change pages by pressing L/R or Left/Right, you'll see you have an ability that is long range and is infinite - but it has a cooldown.
Thanks again for playing, I hope you give it another shot!