Thanks for playing, and glad you liked it!
I think compared to last year the dungeon design suffered a bit - I spent so much (well needed) time on the combat and combat balance that some of the floors were a little weak or uninteresting (at least, for me, although it's hard to tell when exploring your own levels ^_^). Although, I guess there was more variety than last year (mostly because I'd balanced 5 tiers of encounters, so, darn it, there was going to be 5 floors! ;)
Glad you loved the XP from exploring, I mostly did that because I loved the stuff the writer was making so much, it seemed a good way to encourage finding, if not reading, it =).
Hah, awesome bad luck with the reload timing. In practice, the fully leveled characters are the ones that leave and "tier up", so not too surprising it happened to one you didn't want to lose =).