Thank you! We talked a lot about the nature of loops in gameplay mechanics, and we decided that the interesting thing about them is that different opportunities arise at different parts of the cycle.
So if you were to break the loop up into sections, each section should offer something that the others don't. And that was how we came up with the idea of the climbing portion, and using it to give the player time to assess and strategize that they don't have when they're actively falling. If a cycle has rising and falling action, the falling action shouldn't just be dead time. (Of course, in our case, the falling action and the rising action are reversed!)