Thank you so much for the comment! It makes me very happy to know you enjoyed our game this much :)
I'm glad you see the difficulty as more of a challenge. It was meant to be challenging, but I think it became a bit too much for most. One solution to this is to add an easier difficulty that can be picked that will have more conservative timings, numbers on the stick and auto-recentering. The stick remaining in the last position is very much intentional and was one of my design decisions even before starting to program.
The races being too long is my fault. I spent a bunch of work on the music and decided that a race must go until the end of the song, but one of the songs is 5 min... a bit grueling of a task haha.
I'll hunt the sound bug you mentioned down as well.
Thank you for playing!