Thanks for your input!
We are aware about the civilians. People have mentioned it before that they want other ways to make money and that is exactly what we are aiming for. Atm the only way to make money is to either kill civilians or punch the blue sofa in your apartment a couple of times (not many people know about this).
We are going to make the civilians drop much less money than they do now and let the enemies you fight drop more instead. We also intend to implement some sort of "goodguy/badguy" system. If you hit too many civilians the police will eventually show up and either beat you down or arrest you. We want to give the player freedom to do whatever they want, but with consequenses for each action! So this is def something we are looking into.
Regarding the ESC or F2 issue, we are well aware that this is not ideal. We intend to make ESC pause and enter a menu (like every other game does). Any sort of menu system or options menu has not yet been implemented yet tho. That's why ESC restarts the game atm.