2): Not really, the cutscenes are done in a pretty stupid way that makes it hard to trigger them without causing various side-effects (I managed to erase my save file once while testing cutscenes using debug hacks...). It would probably be possible to fix that but at the moment I'm focused on wrapping up another project + surviving day job crunch.
Correct, it's Streets of Frog. It really just needs a couple more assets and a bit of polish and it's done, it's just that a lot of that work is kinda boring and tedious so it goes slow.
And yeah, you'd think society had advanced so far, 60-hour weeks wouldn't be necessary anymore. But there's no technology that can fix bad planning and bad documentation...