thanks, I was also not sure about loosing upgrades on damage to be honest. In one hand it goes well with the shmup tropes but not with the roguelike ones...
I also agree with the lack of different paths, if you look at other games with this kind of system, like slay the spire of course, there are way more "columns" to choose from. I was limited by the 64 pixels constraint on that. I had 3 columns at first and came to the same conclusion, 4 feels only a tiny bit better but is still limited.