Thanks very much for the feedback, and checking out the demo! I did tool around with crouching as I agree it feels like you should be able to. There's a plugin that can change the collision box of the characters sprite sheet to pull it off, but I decided to pass as plugins can sometimes cause issues when new updates come for gb studio.
I'm already pushing the DMG to the limit on object and projectiles as is so the crouch shoot may force me to simplify things even more.
At the end I chose animations and blood spatter over the ability to crouch shoot