Nice post! Always interesting to see the triumphs and struggles of other programmers. Dialogue systems are particularly scary, for the reasons you mentioned in your linked post. It's easy to spend more time working on the tool than on making content! But good job for getting it done on time regardless. I also agree with you that there is a lot of value in doing some planning/pen and paper prototype before jumping straight into the editor.
My game was pretty simple, but a couple of things I'm proud of after this jam were my ability to say "No", and for knowing when to cut bait with a mechanic that would have taken too much time to implement. I've never finished a game before this, so I was very stubborn about keeping the scope small and manageable. If I couldn't clearly see how to implement something after a few hours, I decided it just wasn't worth the time investment. Looking back, I would have cut even more things in order to juice-up the things that are most important, but I guess that's just one of the lessons in time management I had to learn!