Thanks, so glad you enjoyed it!
You're also spot on about a lot of things. We decided to make a game that was very mechanic-heavy as a result of having a week to work on things, but that meant we had less time to do balance passes on the game. Ultimately, we decided it was more important to let the player experience the full suite of tools while being able to clear the game and experience all the content.
Given more time, I think the first things I would have done would be to balance out the game to be better paced, and work on tutorialization.