Thanks for another essay!
Important things first: Can you tell me more on how you got to the point where the inputs where calculated from multiple squares below your position? This happened to me once when i was testing in Firefox and found that the zoom function was broken. It would only zoom for calculations but not for rendering, hence the coordinates were off. I disabled zooming for FF because of this and am now curious on how you managed to break it.
The lag between inputs and their actions shouldn't be too long. What might make it seem longer is the fact that i barely have any action interrupts in apart from getting staggered. Issuing multiple attacks creates a little queue that also feels bad at times.
Dialogue wise i just have to admit i was too lazy to translate and polish it. If anything else was correctly in german, then it's not a big deal at this point. For the blacksmith i wasn't really creative on quest dialogue for this thing, so i left it blank. As a fallback it was just playing a few miliseconds of his introduction. Apologies for this uncomplete mess.
Now to the plans: Yes i would like to experiment with more customization. There is still a hard limit on what i can do (deviating strongly from the base sprite silhouettes is a big nono), but masking specific parts and replace them with a player chosen color, that's a thing i will try soon.
The portraits i also want to incorporate more, so when you customize your dude and you never see those things again because of your equipment, you can at least see that nice portrait in multiple situations. For that i will also add more portrait backgrounds for each environment you are in. This is another reason to rework dialogues completely and have some more NPCs later on with their own portraits.
Depending on the performance of customizable colors on the player sprite, this might open up the possibility of better enemy recolors: Instead of completely hue rotating a goblin, only their skin color or their rags could be changed (and maybe make way for multiple clans of goblins? who knows). Possibly going further with this, would be some sort of color cycling for easy tile animation like flowing grass or ripples in the water.
Other than that, the grid movement will probably go away. In a lot of cases this grid brings more pain than it helps.