Thank you for playing and your kind words!
And yeah, I get that, we were hoping to have a more natural way of progression: originally it was higher notoriety meaning you got harder cards that were more likely to award notoriety, or just weighting questline cards to appear more often to allow more chances to get through them and get the notoriety at the end but sadly ran out of time due to the constraints of the jam.
If we're to update it further after ratings end (which we currently plan to) we're going to try and incorporate some more stuff like that to allow a proper feeling of progression. Thanks for the feedback!