Thanks for playing!
Pausing does not affect the score - indeed, you can ‘plan’ while paused in the current version. I’ve seen games hide the board/queue when paused to prevent this, and may add that in - probably worth doing before adding any kind of saved/shared high scores.
I’ll look into the down interaction - it seemed mostly felt fine from my testing, but there are times when the responsiveness feels odd. Probably a bug or optimization problem in there.