Hi mindbdsm!
Thank you for playing and for your feedback. We are glad you enjoyed it, that really cheer us up!
The demo you played only includes the capital island "city-building" part for which a sandbox mode, as you propose, would totally makes sense (although it raises some "performance related" questions...). However that represents only half of the game, the other one being a 4X-like World Map we are currently developing. The game design is built around the idea that the player will quicly lacks space on its capital island, not being able to build everything he wants. By exploring the World Map he will soon find out that there are other ways to produce basic resources such as food. This will allow him to destroy basic production buildings on his capital island making room for other (more important) buildings that can only be build on it. Hence, providing a way to add islands without any limitation would make the whole map useless. Even if we like the idea, we can't find a way to make it work.
About the tutorial, we fully agree with you: a play through tutorial would be the best. Not only because nobody is reading but also because it is far more "elegant". However, this is a huge work and, at the present time, we prefer to focus on the World Map development.
Once again, thank you for your feedback. Please continue to follow us and we hope you can give us usefull feeback on the future version as you did for this one.