-No plans to make the general NPCs fancier, no. I have a limited time budget, and each walking sprite is nine different pictures I have to carefully craft (though to be fair some of them are just flipped). If you get fancier NPCs, it means you also get one, maybe two less scenes, and I assume most people would much rather have the scenes.
-The reveal on shake is just a limitation of the engine unfortunately. It's not as crisp as I'd like, but there's no way to avoid it without hacky things like transporting to a different map that's mostly empty, which would massively increase programming complexity for all the scenes, and the chances of introducing new bugs.
-Slaps really come down to taste. I did actually prep a loop (may even still be in the files), but I felt it was just too much to be used, too grating, too overpowering, and too repetitive as I'm just using a few canned sounds rather than a uh..."foley artist" giving me a more dynamic performance. A lot of this stuff is a delicate balance, I want to have some degree of sfx, but not so much that it's too much. I think what does it in ultimately is that I made the decision early on to not have these games voiced, largely for money reasons at first, but also because I wanted people to be able to imagine the voices and performances themselves, not be locked into a particular VA. But the side effect of that is that I don't really have a juicy source of moans and slaps, and if I DID it would feel out of place, at least to me.
-This would take way more enemy movement and "AI" (like, 90s "ai", just programmed rulesets) work than I'm able or willing to do. I have set up some rules in certain cases (the alley in Ent Dist I I believe) so they back off a little once one grabs you, but that's about the limit of what I can do. RPGMaker in general really isn't built for sophisticated enemy behavior, it's mostly just detect, at a certain range, move to intercept at a certain speed, trigger script. In light of all this though, the best strategy is not to be careless. Either have the resources for back-to-back fights, or don't initiate one fight too close to where another hyena might approach.
-NPCs are just flavor: they're there to give a little sense of the world. Some of their dialog DOES change: the kitsune have a number of different "barks" in the center path for example. It's not that unusual for minor NPCs in an rpg to just have one line, even in big productions. I do have different reactions in the plaza depending on what you're wearing, and I may add a bit of that to the center path as well, but we'll see. The plaza is more of an exploration, getting to know the setting type area, so I focused more on that kind of thing. Center path is really more of a "fighting your way through" area, even though the "fighting" takes another form, so there isn't as much of that exposition.
Don't mean to be down on you though, I do appreciate hearing thoughts. But in these cases, I have thought about each quite a bit as the game came together, and ended up arriving at a no for a variety of reasons.