Thanks for writing such a long review. It's the more negative and critical, yet constructive posts that help the game the most. I will try to justify some of my design decisions and explain why things are the way they are.

Travel:

Big theme of the game is "progression". That's probably the best word for it. You start the game as someone who is absolutely useles in pretty much every possible way (Unless you pick perks to remove specific weakness). This includes movement.

You base movement speed is super slow and "sprinting" without the "sprinter" perk is almost a joke. However, this changes as you play the game. 

Your sprint speed increases with your agility stat. The higher it is, the faster you get. On top of that, gaining all major mutations will also make you faster. Not to mention you can buy / make speed potions that also make you much faster. There is also a quest that gives you a small motorcycle that will again increase your movement speed.

I decided to make your starting speed so slow for two reasons. One is the "progression" theme, where your starting speed is incredibly low, but can get about twice as high towards the endgame. To me, this makes the game more satisfying since I can actualy see the results of my numbers getting bigger and makes the difference between starting character and endgame character much bigger. Second reason is exploration. Since the player is so slow, he will spend more time traveling through maps and thus make it harder to miss certain details. It forces the player to explore the maps more because they want to find shortcuts / optimal ways to travel.

The negative is that this lasts only for a little while. the slower movement speed will get boring and tedious towards the midgame. You already explored all the maps and found all items and shortcuts but you still move quite slow. The solution for that is the fast travel system alrady in game.

Your review makes it look like you missed the fast travel system, since it pretty much does what you suggested. 

There is a board in front of your hideout and there is another one in Riverstone. Interacting with them will let you fast travel between them, but you have to pay with food every time. There is also a player waypoint system. You can create your own fast travel points from the radial menu and travel to them at any point in the game (as long as you are in an outdoor area). 

All these tools make traveling much less of a chore in my opinion. You will get more fast travel waypoints as you play and combining them with other shortcuts you opened and board fast travel will let you reach pretty much all major areas very quickly. When I play, I quickly create a network of fast travel points at important locations so I can spend less time walking, I open all the rope shortcuts I can and use them too. And as I play longer, I get access to speed potions and the motorcycle, which makes traveling even faster.

Also, sprinting has one other important use. It lets you run away from chasing enemies. If you get it high enough, you can pretty much zoom past all the abominations in the caves without them catching you. Get a speed potion and the bloodstone quest becomes much easier.

Dungeons:

Right of the bat, I agree that all dungeons are horribly balanced. There is no denying it. 

The first kobold "dungeon" is a relic from the extremely early days and I will be changing it completely in the future. As you said, the way it railroads you and pretty much kills you if you enter it unprepared is pretty lame. Doubly so since it is right in front of your hideout and I bet most players died to the scavenger, reloaded the game, entered the cave, died again, turned the game off and never played it again. By the way, I'm not sure if you are aware, but you can befriend the kobolds in that cave and get a companion. Don't enter it for the first few game weeks and new NPC will appear near your hideout and give you a simple quest.

Spider dungeon will get a slight rework. I will be giving it the same luck system the other kobold cave has. Loot pool of both these locations will get rebalanced to be less overpowered. One way I want to spice the spider mine is to add a few enemies with "eyes" so that dodging them and ninja looting the entire place will be slightly harder.

And same goes for the small kobold dungeon. Right now, it gives you way too many good resourcess that can be sold for quite a lot and requires pretty much no efford to go through.

People:

I find the fact that NPCs sell all the basic stuff a good thing, but the game right now is not big enough to make it really shine. The game is pretty limited right now and your max skill level is roughly 50, since there are no recipes for most skills after that. As the game gets bigger, this soft cap will get pushed up and reach roughly 500 in the final version. Right now, you can pretty much max all skills in a year, but later versions will force you pick one or two and stick with them. The fact that close to half of your skill levels are not really useful right now is a problem, but this will get naturaly solved as the game progresses.

NPC shops also shows you what the skills will do if you stick to them. The blacksmith sells tools and weapons, so naturaly you realize that you will be able to make these if you train with him. Farmer sells vegetables so you have a rough idea what the farming skill will let you produce. Inn sells some basic food so again, you have a rough idea what the cooking skill does. And (in future versions) even if you have no intention to raise some of those skills, you can still get the basic items and not be locked out of the basic content other skills offer.

Without the inn selling food, you would be forced to learn farming and cooking. It is still a good idea to learn those skills, since they will make your life much easier, but it is not mandatory if you want to just survive. Same goes for crafting, smithing, survival and so on. I want the game to alow you to "try" what these skills are about without having to commit to them from the star. The first year of the game is supposed to show you what all skills focus on and let you use some basic items  from skills you don't even have yet, just so you can decide with which skill you want to stick with.

All in all, what you are saying is true. The game is rather short and having NPCs sell pretty much everything you can learn and craft is a bummer and makes those skills less useful. This will however change as I add more skill levels and recipes, all of which will be absent from NPC trade inventories and make sticking with a skill more rewarding.

Adults in battle:
I admit the combat is very unbalanced right now. Some thing are underdeveloped, some are outdated and were not touched in several versions. However, the idea of adults being strong is on purpose. Again, it's the whole "progression" thing. You start the game with 10hp and the first follower you get is an old farmer who has 250hp. It shows the contrast between you and other people and shows how weak an useless you are compared to ordinary adults who are not even trained warriors. And it makes the moment you finaly get you HP above 250 that much better. You were just a child getting bullied by overgrown chicken and kobolds and you had to rely on old huntress and a farmer to protect you. And after some time, you got stronger and you don't even need them now when you go exploring. And if you take them with you, then you are the one protecting them.

Right now, it is unbalanced in a way that you can recruit the strongest NPCs way too quickly. That's what I'm working on with the favor system. For example, Olaf will now require 30 relationship to follow you. Billy will still follow you pretty much from the start, but everyone else will take more time to persuade. On top of that, I plan to add "quirks" to all NPCs. For example, Roman will ask you for a beer after every battle and will leave you if you run out. Marcus will refuse to enter caves, Olaf will be scared of spiders and his stats will be drasticaly reduced when fighting them and so on.

Not only will this give NPCs more personality, but it will also force you to actualy pick proper people for what you have in mind instead of always taking Zach, Helena and Valdemar.

The rest:

Helena and her healing is overpowered, I agree. I will be making her healing abilities weaker but I also want to add some other mechanic to make it more interesting. Like if you make her heal you too often, she will get upset or maybe she will feel weak the next day and won't follow you.

Sadly, control scheme is not something that I can easily change. RPGMXP is really old and limited in many ways and the only way to change controls right now is by pressing F1 while in game. And even then the options there are fairly limited. I will be working on improved control scheme and even rebindable keys at some point. But the controls right now are not so bad once you get used to them. The entire game can be controled pretty much by one hand if you have full sized keyboard (Arrows for movement, enter for confirm, num 0 for back, PGup/PGdown for menu navigation and other actions and shift for some other actions. All nicely together).

Perks are not very balanced and will get more attention for sure. As you said, some are free points. However, psychopath is not that great in the long run. Without it, the negatives you get for killing humanoids or abominations will turn into bonuses as time goes on so your mood will actualy increase when you fight. With psychopath trait, you will always stay at 0 mood bonuses.

You are right. Second wind was bugged. I fixed it for the next version.

Skills being less useful is something I talked about above. Just want to add that I will be adding more uses to skills so they are not just a recipe gates.

I'm really happy that you played the game and liked it enough to write all these observations and suggestions. Don't be afraid to write again if you have any more suggestions or bugs. I will definitely read them. 

Thanks.