Thank you for the feedback and thanks for coming back. It's funny that you said "bending the game towards the jam theme". It was the actually the other way around. We started with the things that fit the theme, and then added the other elements. The main game loop was one of the last things we came up with. It was going to be an idle shmup at some point, but then we came up with these wonky controls and liked them, and then we just substituted asteroids for the enemies, otherwise it would be too hard.
The scaling is a problem. We didn't have too much time to balance it well, so the game is too hard at the beginning for some people, and then becomes very easy once you have a lot of parts. I agree that making it an idle game would have made this problem go away.