Hey, thanks for the feedback! These are all good points, and I'll try to address them individually.
1.) The guidance on when to time handing out tokens is non-specific to help prevent the Strangers from easily deducing what words are poisoned and, about as important, to give the Keeper of Silence at least a little more agency and stuff to do. The Keeper really only has two levers to pull the whole game: decide a word is poisoned and time when to hand out tokens. If the timing was more automatic, they really wouldn't have much to do.
The hope is that the flexibility will both keep the Strangers paying more attention to the Keeper (at least in the back of their mind) as they talk and keep the Keeper invested in the beat-to-beat unfolding of the Strangers' conversation. Allowing another player (the Keeper) to have agency over how tokens are doled out, within reason, keeps the Strangers from off-loading that concern from their considerations during play. Even as they start to figure out a pattern, it can change.
There are other options that could definitely be more thematic, but I also wanted to limit components as much as I could, since Hush is already relatively component-heavy for a micro-RPG. I'm open to other suggestions to maintain the considerations and tensions described above without adding more components, though.
2.) The decision to have multiple community dice was twofold. First, I didn't want to require a whole second set of tokens to track the community progress, and people are much more likely to have a few dice than a second type of tokens. Second, I wanted each Stranger to have their own community die, instead of one singular one that everyone contributes to, to ensure the new community is only formed after every surviving Stranger is able to fulfill others' desires and contribute to the community. Thematically, I didn't want half of the Strangers to reach the goal of "forming a new community" for everyone without the other Strangers contributing. You need everyone's participation to form a community. Perhaps there's a bit of disconnect with naming them "community dice" and everyone having their own... Perhaps something like "contribution dice" would be a better fit?
3) The paranoia is admittedly more for the characters than the players, so maybe it's not the best for the marketing copy about how the game feels. As a micro-RPG, there aren't really enough stakes or competing interests for much paranoia at the player level. But I would classify the experience of the Stranger characters, who could drop dead at any time and are gradually coming to the conclusion that it's due to (some) of the words they speak killing them, as fairly paranoia-inducing. I don't know that "paranoiac" is different enough or specific enough to fit, but I'm open to other options.