Thanks for the detailed feedback! It's always valuable for us to get the perspective of a new player reacting to the game for the first time, so your input is really appreciated. Many of the other issues you noted are things that are already on our radar and we're hoping to address in future updates, and it's always good to have another voice to affirm that the changes we're experimenting with are things that people actually care about.
A few days ago we rolled out a new patch (beta 6.1) that should hopefully address the freezing issue you encountered, but please let us know if this issue persists.
Regarding the issue with Radio shows, can you clarify what you mean by "can't cancel?" "Canceling" a show (by clicking the "cancel" button) basically deletes it from the list of shows that are in active production. Is that what you're trying to do? Is the issue that clicking the "cancel" button doesn't work, clicking it does something unexpected, or is it an issue that's separate from how the "cancel" button functions? If you could provide a screenshot of the particular issue it would be really helpful in diagnosing and addressing this issue.
The early-game economy is something one of the things we're looking to adjust with the next patch. I'm curious as to whether you made use of the "loans" feature to get an early infusion of cash. If you did use the loans feature, what was your experience with that? Did you take out loans from the bank, Fujomoto, or both, and did you continue completing quests from Fujimoto to get more loans or did you just take out an initial loan? And if you didn't take out loans, was this due to you not knowing about it, not being able to locate the menu, or not wanting to have to have a loan payment that would subtract from future income?
The fact that getting rid of staffers is costly is sort of by design, but you can fire then without paying severance if you blame them for a scandal (this is represented in-game by the option to spend scandal points instead of money to fire staffers). Is this something that you made use of at all? If you weren't able to fire staffers using scandal points, was the issue that you didn't have enough scandals, or that you wanted to fire a large number of staffers and ran out of scandal points? If the latter, was there a particular reason that you found yourself firing a lot of staffers (was it because you found yourself in an unexpected financial pinch and had to cut expenses, or because you hired a lot of staffers at the start of the game and realized later that some of them were redundant and/or not worth the cost)? You can fire staffers without penalty in the first 30 days, which acts as a sort of safeguard against players starting a new game, hiring a bunch of staffers, and then realizing that they didn't need as many staffers as they thought, but it sounds like you were in the position of firing staffers outside that window, so I'd be curious as to how that came about.