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Thanks a bunch for your feedback, it is most useful to get this kind of play testing. Don't feel obliged to read or even respond to the below, but if you enjoy this kind of thing, its a window into... how I think:-)

The physics are, as you suggest, what they are. Physics on a grid are inherently wonky, and later in the game there are puzzles explicitly based on learning some of the intricacies of that.

The controls however... I'm very sympathetic. You're not telling me something I don't know, instead you're doing something maybe even more important: you're reminding me of something I already know but have pushed aside. This is a fairly tough nut to crack:

• Digging is one of the small joys of the game to me, an inherently pleasurable action, more fun than traversing open spaces. Not the rote digging out of large spaces of course, but a more fun way to get from A to B. I think this is inherent in all digging games.
• Keeping dirt around also keeps the puzzles more open ended and open for alternative solutions, things like "set up the solution before executing it"
• This gets more important late in the game where I want to do more not to signal the solution 
• So, I don't want to remove a lot of the dirt
• A lot of the actions in the game are irreversible, and timing is important, so you're going to fail a lot... something I've tried to deal with in many ways, including by making the levels fairly short (as compared to many of the oldies which inspired this game), and the speed, including transition speeds, fairly high.
• So, I don't want to slow down the digging too much
• But right now digging is just as fast as moving, and that's clearly not working out for you... so something's gotta give.

I believe I will, as you suggest, play around with introducing a small delay each time you dig, giving you some time to release the controls. I will probably make it fairly small, but not unusably so, and provide an option to remove it altogether, or make it longer, in the accessibility settings. Then I just need to playtest and tweak until it feels right for me, and then find another You to check my math :-) 

I also clearly need to introduce the "eye bomb" prior to The Pale Queen, as has been previously suggested... the problem is that this likely means yanking a different level and... in my mind they all have a role to play. The eye bomb was a late addition to the level, to make it easier to get through the wall, which previously relied on hitting the regular exploding monster with a boulder, which was really easy to mess up... which was frustrating, since it prevents you from retrying the main event of the level. The eye bomb can just be dropped on the wall, which essentially removes that problem. But... thinking about that, I believe there is another route for me to take to solve this problem as well: remove the wall, and with it the need for the eye bomb! The original impetus for it is mostly gone anyway.

And if anyone liked the bomb... well, it wasn't invented for this level but sees plenty of use later in the game, where it was originally introduced.

I just released a new version of the demo which stops the player for 20ms delay before digging into a new dirt block. I tried a number of different lengths and can confidently say that for me 50ms it just too long. I might try to go to 30ms, but wanted to start with a more modest change and get it out there, after which I can play with the higher delay and see how it goes. I hope this helps adress at least part of your concern about the controls, but I will frankly need to get more testing done by others before I can confidently tell. I might also try to center the option to turn down the game speed, or even make a slightly slower default.

To complement this change I also modified both Avalanche and The Pale Queen, so that they require less digging overall. The Pale Queen was also modified to remove the need to blow up the wall, and thus the eye bomb could be removed, and is once again introduced later in the game, as originally planned.

Oh, and singular "deformity" obviously.

Once again, thanks! Feedback makes a better game.

Made another tweak for better controls, this time one gets a similar small pause before continuing after doing a 180 while entering a tile. This means that it's substantially easier to turn around and just stop, without proceeding further back. I also increased the previously introduced pause time to 30ms.