Your insight will help a lot with untangling our poor approaches to jamming and game dev in general. Following your advice, we will be sticking as a two-man team for the next jam as well ( + our name kinda loses its meaning if we change the number of devs or temporarily split lol).
We'll also be diving into the next jam following along with your advice and practices, while also creating a time slot for to playtest games during jams. Since the game wasn't done - the feedback won't be that useful and a time sink since they are missing the "bigger picture" - was a kind of dumb generalised mentality we had during jams (especially since it never got to the bigger picture) and won't be the case anymore since we will using the iterative approach you recommended. These changes will hopefully drop the flop factors by giga amounts so that we can actually put something out that we can feel overall good about.
Since we will be (attempting) to make a fun and exciting mechanic driven game first and building around it and instead of the reverse, we'll hopefully be making a bit more of a splash next time around!
Again, thank you for the time you put into helping us!