Thank you for playing our game and leaving such a detailed review!
Yeah, the pricing of the items was definitely a place where we had to cut corners due to time constraints; originally, we had envisioned that the items are sold for a fraction of the previous stage’s required score so it would motivate player to beat the score by as much as possible in order comfortably buy power-ups without straying too far from the score goal of the next stage.
Selling and rerolling items is a great suggestion that we’ve heard a few times now and we’ll absolutely include in future updates to the game. Combining them sounds GREAT, to be honest with you so we’ll definitely look into that (maybe setting up a “grinder” that allows you to grind multiple items in order to create a new powerful one).