Yeah I've received a lot of complains about the game difficulty, personally I think there's no point to enable strafing/reloading while sprinting, otherwise player can just be sprinting all the time. But this particular limitation is what makes the game too hard. So I pushed a update today which implements difficulty selection, in the easy mode, you can outrun the pests even when walking, so if moving correctly, without sprinting you can avoid contact with the pests. Hope that makes the experience better.
You mentioned it might be better if running-reloads are slower or have some downsides, that could be a better game design. Sadly it'll require rewriting a big chunk of code to implement that, frankly I'm not going to investigate that much time in a game of this scale.
Also I lowered the shaking intensity needed for shake off action, many people include my friend had reported the mouse shake is like nuts.
Thanks for you suggestions and feedbacks.