Thank you for such a detailed review!
I had wanted to tweak the physics but that would have meant rebalancing all the levels and I didn't have time for that.
You're the second person to mention not being able to move horizontally after jumping, that's not been my experience of how jumping usually works but admittedly I don't play a lot of platform games because I'm rubbish at them, maybe that's where I'm going wrong! After you mentioned it, I tried it in your game (haven't tried it in any of the other platformers yet) but that was really difficult for me to get the hang of, I found myself using both the arrows keys and WSAD! Just seen you can do it in Tilevania too. Huh.
The end of acceptance was definitely not supposed to represent suicide. Originally the "character" was supposed to be surrounded in glowy balls that floated around but there wasn't time.
I do agree that the first level is a real slog, when you've played something a hundred times its hard to gauge whether its the intended level of awful for someone who is only going to play it a couple of times (and each time you start further in, I even made it so that if you ended up there a 4th time, you're basically by the exit, just in case!)
With the dropping platforms, the first one was supposed to drop you on to a platform below it, to introduce the mechanic in a "non fatal" way. I think there's only 1 that is directly over a trap.
I may relook at Regret, you were supposed to head towards the sprigs of Heather (doesn't always work as when it disappears it moves to the next waypoint in the list, regardless of where you go), I did add additional platforms after the original design to put powerups on and that might have messed up the path.