Initially the game was supposed to be more challenging, but I was worried that it might interfere with gameplay during the jam period.
Yeah that's fair. I think the jam will bring in a more casual audience, and while that's fine... it also means you'd get a lot of complaints about the game being too hard from people who might not usually dive into the space or play that many games, or even people who want to play everything and getting stuck on one game in particular might end up being annoying.