Thanks for playing!
Your experiences match up pretty closely with what I was expecting. In my ideal version of the game, I'd avoid the rule dump by having the games be extraordinarily simple to start then adding in "house rule" rule changes throughout the game. The original concept for the game was that the game would evolve over time as the group kept making "sequels" to a base game. Winning/losing wouldn't matter too much at first since the game would be almost entirely luck based, which is why I wanted to do the Poker Night at the Inventory thing of making the main draw be the conversation around the game.
Ultimately, most of that didn't make it into this prototype since I started programming card rendering last night and didn't get to gameplay programming until after midnight. By the time I was coding the 'real' game, my brain was already effectively mush. The character creator represents at least 90% of the time spent on the game, which is why it's a little more polished.