Hey, with the extra lives you don't get if you've already three then I would do it! ;) More seriously it confused me for quite some runs when I died with around the same score and around the same place after being quite sure I got damaged like 2 more times or 2 less times. The furthest I got so far is the 3rd pattern of the second (final?) boss although I'm passing through its second pattern only by chance and/or because I've got enough lives left, I can't manage to apprehend this one.
The game is super cool, definitely feels like an arcade one. It looks and sounds great, controls perfectly with all the right speeds and the sequences are very cool to deal with including specially fun boss fights with super nice patterns. I like your theme intepretation although as it's for scoring and I've not beaten the game yet I've used it only to see how it works (I regularly don't use the secondary fire), and it's cool.
That's a very cool game, thanks for sharing.