Thanks for playing and the feedback. Glad you had fun.
We've got some changes for a post-jam release for the upgrades list to grey out the options you can't get yet, and highlight some we recommend getting sooner. This will hopefully make it not quite so overwhelming.
We saw a couple games in a jam we did recently with auto-save, and really liked it, so wanted to add it to ours. Similar with the leaderboard.
I agree on the upgrade screen UX. We designed it in isolation, when it should have had more thought to the integrated experience. The long list of upgrades resulted in the tall section on the left, and we wanted the central section to have the dialog, with the ship being centered, which pushed the details to the right. It worked OK on its own. Then we added the play and menu buttons, which best fit in the center, and realized it didn't work so well, but we also did not have the time to redesign the whole thing. We've got some ideas, and will redo it if we continue working on this game.