Hey thanks for the feedback! Hopefully you had good time with the game regardless of the hickups. Are you playing the latest version 2.2? I think I found the source of the lag and it should be fixed now in the latest update.
I tried to replicate the equipping and unequipping bug you mentioned, but couldn't get it to happen. I'll still browse through the code if I could find a problem there..
Someone else also mentioned the bear trap bug. It's still a bit of a mystery to me. I might have to consider coming up with new eventing/scripting for the bear trap if I can't find any other solutions...
The time passage is meant to advance every time you sleep. Not every time you save. So if you'd sleep 3 times in a row, it should be the next day regardless if you checked the daytime outside or not. But you're saying it's jumping in time more than it should?
You can recruit all the (currently) playable characters. But they have pretty specific conditions on how to get them. They are also mostly time specific. Like you have to meet them on certain day or else you'll miss them. This is because of the balancing reasons, because a full party in this game is pretty over-powered.
And finally, I seriously have no answers to how enemies are smart enough to avoid bear traps and booby traps occasionally. It looks very intentional on their part, but there is no line of coding that would prompt them to do that stuff.