You're completely right. I had made the choice to increase hitbox size slightly as the bullets travelled further to punish those that stay near the edge of the screen to gain an advantage, but forgot about that change when I started polishing the game up with sprites and covering the hitboxes. So by slowing down the projectile speeds while cleaning up the bullet patterns I had inadvertently made the hitboxes much larger by the time they reach the bottom of the stage (almost making it impossible to dodge through them). Sorry about that, that was removed. Thank you for the feedback!