Thank you for playing and giving your analysis! Here are some points on your ponderings:
It's all old school technology, so Tetris attempts to play as the original did, including how tiles appear and are being manipulated with arrow keys. I was thinking of let the pieces land using ship thusters only, but it was way too fiddly for me as a player to handle. Being able to stop the piece mid-air was another helper that I just had to put there for playability's sake.
As for the radar, it too is old, and merely tells where asteroids are in relation to your ship's nose. It's up to the pilot to decide what to do with that information.
You are right to feel sorry for the asteroids, nothing and nobody is completely evil. It may turn out that these asteroids are merely pawns in a game that was set in motion for reasons that are not yet known, and are clearly beyond this game jam's scope. Who knows what further information is revealed in the future...