Even though we have eased up on it since the original idea, the movement is designed to reward quick reactions and decision making. The idea with the bounce and slide is that you lose some control in exchange for using them, so they are not “free”. We felt that this is more rewarding for the player, and that it added replayability in the form of speedrunning and trying to minimize unnecessary movements. If a jump can be cleared without the bounce, it can be optimized. If a section can be past without interrupting the slide, it can be performed in a more clean way. The limitations of the movement give the player a puzzle to solve, and simply having every move be free would not be as fun, at least to us. If mouse could always jump with the speed of the bounce, or walk at the speed of the slide without losing any control, the game would just not be fun, or so we believe.
The weird hitboxes of the environment can be fixed easily after the voting period, and we are aware of some in stage 2 in particular.
For the controls, we kind of regret adding the option to play with arrow keys, as WASD+Space feels much more natural. A lot of people who initially tried playing with Arrow Keys + Space reported that the game feels a lot better with WASD.