Thank you for the feedback, and the ricocheting bullets were our artist/programmer, Tavera04's idea.
I'll run by our team the idea of attack boost vs health boost, we had planned ( and plan to in our "remaster") to add some different boss phases, a second mechanic, and some cannons in the rooms between.
I agree it definitely needs some juice, that's something I usually run out of time for. I don't consider game juice a "hot fix" update, so I won't update until after the voting session just to be fair. But I would like to add some particles for sure, and I debated screen shake but was afraid it would be difficulty to track the already slightly erratic bullet patterns.