Thanks! The game uses Unreal Engine 5 - probably pretty overkill for a game of this type, but it was what we had the most familiarity with going into the jam. While it had its obvious downsides in not being able to target the web, it did end up paying off a bit by having a relatively new audio synchronization system (Quartz) which really reduced the overhead for us on the actual "rhythm" part of the game, as it handles most of the latency compensation under the hood and follows the beat/bar pattern that we wanted for the game.
I really like your idea of tying more audio/visual effects to the sliders; we originally wanted to get more player-driven audio elements into the game, but ended up getting pretty bogged down by the main audio component, which was a lot trickier than we originally imagined. Also agree on the positive reinforcement aspect - we really wanted to encourage open-ended/exploratory gameplay, but felt like score/accuracy alone might not be engaging enough for a subset of players; as you indicated, there's probably a better solution to that than the health system we ended up going with.
Thanks for the detailed feedback!