Hey thanks for trying the game out. I understand the sentiment; DragonSweeper's design is quite tight and doesn't have much design space in its base formula in that regard. I don't know if I would call my expansion "lazy" but by adding additional design vectors to expand the space (enemy types, map size, items), I agree that I "loosened" what made DragonSweeper great in the hopes that it can provide a similar but differentiated experience
A lot of items do break the core conceit of the game -- I admit a lot of them were me just trying stuff out. The nice part is I can balance them but since there's so many, I often like to think of it as letting you choose your difficulty to some degree