Your main critique (the movement) isn't something that's going to change. The game in fact has nearly a 1 to 1 copy of melee's movement, as that's part of the appeal. You feel like you're dropping inputs because there's no buffer: If you want something to happen on frame one after some lag ends, you have to press it on frame one after some lag ends. This is something that raises the skill ceiling significantly, because otherwise there's no need to time anything at all. You have all the tools for movement to be far more fluid than any other game you've ever played, you just need to become good enough to use them.
I'm simply voicing a subjective issue I had with my first impressions of the game, the controls do not feel good, they feel unresponsive and clunky. I want a PLATFORMER's fundemental movement mechanics to feel intuitive and silky smooth from the getgo while allowing for further technicality that is slowly taught over the course of the game. Celeste, a game that is listed as a primary inspiration, does this wonderfully, it feels good to control from the start and slowly guides you into progressively harder maneuvers. Making it a chore to just move around from the very start is not how I think a game like this should be designed, fundemental movement should come naturally, then you make the other techniques hard to perform. All I ask for are OPTIONAL changes to the game's controls to make it more accessible and feel less shitty. Input buffering, better air control, smoother landings, and a general increase in basic fluidity. This isn't Melee, the controls can be modified from that original, unpolished, archaic template to feel more intuitive, accessible, and modern. This game clearly has a high skill ceiling, and I want it to have one. It just needs to lower its skill floor a bit so Joe Schmoes like me can sit down and just play a game after school for a couple of hours without having to constantly fight the controls. Every other ball-bustingly hard game I've played (whether it be Super Meat Boy, Celeste, Enter the Gungeon, DOOM Eternal, ULTRAKILL, etc.) does this, I only ask that this one follow suit.
Also, as an aside, no game should strive to recreate Melee's controls exactly one to one. Having no buffer is bad and archaic, plain and simple. Rivals of Aether is inspired by the same game, has a six-frame input buffer, still maintains a high skill ceiling, and feels leagues better to play to the point where I can have fun just playing training mode and messing around with the controls, because they feel good. That is not the case with this game, and RoA isn't even a dedicated single player platformer like this, a genre whose entire appeal is centered around fluid, responsive controls.
I'm sorry but i very heavily disagree, this game is incredible. Thinking it's just a 1:1 recreation of melee seems to me like the opinion of someone who doesnt actually play melee. It's in the same vain, yes, but you cannot in good conscience say the game has 'bad/archaic' controls just because you aren't comfortable with it after playing an Alpha demo. It's definitely not for everyone, and certainly not as easy to grasp as celeste for example (extremely simple game, incredibly designed), but that isn't really what this game is trying to be.
I literally said I really liked the game and admired the direction it was going in, I was just voicing feedback as a consumer that the game's basic movement (running, jumping, general traversal, etc.) could feel better, because, in my opinion, to ME, it does not feel very good to play. The game very frequently does not do what I want it to, even though it feels like it should. All I ask for is an optional buffer system, better air control, and a smoother transition from air to ground, maybe something akin to the accessibility features in Celeste. I don't want the game to be dumbed down, just made smoother to play. I don't mind having to learn a game's advanced controls, I just want the basic traversal to feel good without having to devote tons of practice to it. No other platformer or platform fighter I've played has felt this awkward to control as a newcomer, save for the ~10 minutes of Melee I played about a year ago before abandoning it out of frustration with the controls, it's the exact same feeling of awkwardness, hence why I compare the two so much. I just want this game to feel like every other game I've played, and since it's an alpha demo deep in active development, I felt I should voice my issues in the hopes that they get remedied in the final product.