I'm glad the physics worked so well for you! Doing a rotation-based system like this was new for me and I had some issues getting the right scaling for things like aspect ratios and frame rates, but I think it worked out really well in the end. After my experience in last year's competition where I had trouble tuning gravity just right, I ended up going with 8.16 fixed point (16 bits of subpixels) for position and velocity here instead of the usual 8.8, which I think made a big impact in having the angles feel right. Without that precision, there'd be a lot of adjacent angles with identical X or Y components.
Omitting a pause feature was an intentional decision, because I was worried it would be too tempting to abuse it and it might cut the tension too much. As a compromise, I made it so you're perfectly still after respawning even with gravity enabled, and the in-game timer pauses until you start moving again. I'm surprised by the number of requests I've had for a pause feature, and while I'm still not sure it's right for the game, I'm definitely not sure what the right way would be to add it in. Two options I've considered are to have a cooldown after unpausing where you have to wait some amount of time before you can pause again, or requiring that your velocity be low enough on both X and Y to pause. The latter might be harder to abuse (depending on the thresholds), but is much less discoverable and clear. These also present more headaches for me in terms of speedrun timing; speedrunners have requested I change the in-game timer in an update to time deaths, but I plan to still have the timer be paused when you respawn until you move. If you can pause the game, I'd prefer not to time it, but I worry that would enable speedrun exploits of the in-game timer like we're currently seeing with deaths.
I definitely appreciate the feedback!