Alas! I am unforgiven!
Definitely agree with you on the directional input; it needs some buffer time. It's on the list for our polish build.
If we ever make a commercial version of this game, we'll definitely include more platforming challenges. I'm right there with you. For this release, I had to ease players into trickier platforming sequences to keep difficulty manageable. Because it's such a short experience (and because of my choice to focus on varied gameplay for pacing / player retention), I couldn't really start doing tighter platforming until the end when player skill is high enough to compensate.
Thank you for sharing your experience with some of the narrative bits. I put a ton of work and iteration into those to make them as impactful as I could with the time that I had. There's more I plan to do to make them even better, but that'll be for the polish build.
Thanks so much for playing!