Y'know, after playing a bit more, I honestly don't think that the difficulty is too much, at least on Practice Mode, for me. Sorry for the unhelpful feedback, haha. The controls (specifically the up/down weapons and flash shield) took some getting used to simply due to being different from any other shooter I've played, but I think I've crossed that hurdle now. I'm still having trouble finding ways to apply the down/up firing modes to gameplay, but it's nice to have them just for some flexibility.
Oh, two little bugs (that you've probably already fixed, but they're broken in the jam version): on the continue screen, you can move the character left and right with the arrow keys (I couldn't find any use for this, so I assume it's a bug), and during gameplay, holding left and right fire at the same time causes the player character to rapidly switch direction.