Hey, Fenos. Thanks for the comments. In specific response:
1) The fonts initially used in the game were a deliberate attempt to match (as closely as I could) the fonts I'd used in the original Caverns. However, a lot of people complained that they were hard to read, so it now defaults to something much easier to read (at least in most instances), with the option to toggle back to the gothic fonts if a player wishes. The character creation menu still uses stylized fonts for the large lettering, because the feedback I was getting was that at that scale everything remained legible, even in that style. But if enough people raise this as an issue, I'll switch the fonts on that page, too. Wouldn't be too tricky an issue to address, I don't think. In terms of changing the "new", smaller font (the one I already switched to to make things legible), if that was also deemed hard to read, the one problem would be that since screen co-ordinates remain absolute, and there's finite room to print things in the supplied text boxes, I would have to find something that remained pixel perfect in alignment with the old font. If a printed sentence grew even one or two pixels longer as a result of changing fonts, it could mess up all outputted text and take dozens of hours to realign everything manually (if that was even possible).
2) Initially movement was in all 8 directions for player and monsters. But I hated allowing either to move diagonally between walls or other impassable obstacles (where wall corners abutted, for instance). Imposing the restriction there ended up being a pain in the ass programming-wise, but even more so in gameplay, because players were getting confused as to why they couldn't do so, so I culled it back to 4 directions, and I've since grown used to it in game. I've been playing some Moria lately, and I'll admit when first coming back to Caverns it was jarring for me to have only 4 directional movement, but it wore off quickly, so changing it isn't a high priority. Players who aren't used to roguelikes also find the 4 directional movement easier to grasp, so there's an upside.
3) Not sure what you mean by "Bar buttons" or "down here." If you mean the clickable buttons to change sidescreen tabs, that's the only screen real estate available where they won't overlap anything important. At the bottom of the screen they would need either impinge on the view screen or the Situation Panel. Are those the buttons you're referencing?
4) When I first abandoned Caverns in favour of starting Caverns 2 (in 2010) I was still using a 4:3 monitor. I had recently programmed another tile based game called "The Zombie Nightmare of Fillibree County" and it used 1024*768. Since this was a marked improvement over the original Caverns' 640*480, I just went with it. Today I'm working on a 4K monitor and if I could go back in time, I'd make a different choice. But, cards on the table, I'm not a savvy enough coder to know how to allow players to choose their resolution. And I suppose there may well be some players still out there with 4:3 monitors, so 1024*768 might not be the worst choice... And further cards on the table, screen positions are hard coded - i.e. the game checks absolute X,Y coordinates for the mouse and places things at hard coded specific X,Y coordinates, etc. Changing the resolution now, even just to a new, single specified resolution, would mean months of work. And since the graphics aren't going to be scalable, it would really yield little fruit. Unless I get around to programming COX 3 in 10 or 20 years, this one almost certainly won't change.
Glad you're enjoying the game! The one thing I can promise is even more content... in time.