Aaa glad to hear you enjoyed the game, thank you so much for playing El Inn!
I did notice in a few test runs that the RNG was hard to work with, especially when it made the same character pop up several times in a row, or didn't spawn another character for a long time like you mentioned. Will be working to remedy that in the next update, probably with a sort of pity system where if one character doesn't spawn for too long, the next spawn is guaranteed to be them, and maybe reduce the spawn rate of maxed out characters too! Must have been frustrating to wait for Cael to appear ^^'
The similarity of the dishes was meant to be a challenge yes, but I agree with you, it is an accessibility issue. I'm planning on adding one or two of the dish's ingredients behind it, like Sugar Cake having a bag of sugar behind and Milk Cake having the carton of milk, and increasing the contrast of the colours between similarly coloured dishes. I'll take your suggestions into consideration for the substitute challenge when preparing recipes!
Thank you again for playing El Inn, and for your feedback and thoughts! I really appreciate it ( ≧ᗜ≦)