I'm super happy you come back to the game!
You are completely right about the skip action, I'm going to yank that out next!
I understand about the trees, and as a player I agree. But here's a lite tidbit about the trees: they are there for optimisation! The shadow algorithm (most shadow-casting algorithms in 2d roguelikes) take a lot of resources in open spaces. So when running this game on my raspberry pi it started to be janky and less responsive, taking half a second to react to key presses. So I added trees and now it runs smoothly even on my raspberry pi.
The ability to knocking on the trees come more or less free as that action is added to all objects in the map generation.
I'm so glad you took the time to write as it makes me think if there's something I can do different, something to replace the trees with. Maybe have small buildings without doors or just walls, would that work? wdyt?