There's a lot of really strong ideas here, but it needs some polish.
The controls are pretty clunky, I see you did mention you had some ideas to improve them. The hot start is pretty disorienting combined with the unusual control scheme.
A free play mode would have been nice at the end, I wanted to paint the island!
It's a neat choice to have the seeds and burning options not be linked. As passive and active measures that "you" the human walking around the island can take. It almost makes the game feel like the camera is more like me looking down and walking around.