Thanks for your thoughts! Although here's a couple things that we want to clear up from our perspective.
From what we've seen from when we were looking around at other platformers for inspiration, lots do have "limited" or "fixed" movement to keep the game balanced and leave the game's limits up to the player. The movement here is not completely restrictive as it's physics based, but it's because it's not entirely fixed that the player needs to take more caution than usual before their next jump as they could mess up at any point if they time some part of it wrong (which is where the risk comes in).
Some sections took more advantage of the mechanic than others but I believe that the base is there so that it can be further expanded upon like other platformers based on one mechanic but also requires precision and caution to complete (Getting over it, only up, chained together, as examples of inspiration for the game).
For testing, we originally had a button (for debugging/playtesting with other users) that people could use to get back off the ground but it ended up being easily exploitable with no consequence and there needed to be a punishment for players that are landing on a platformer in momentum so the 1 second wait on the ground limit was implemented to counteract this.
The most important thing we had to think up on was balance as the game should continuously challenge the player but not to a absolutely frustratingly pinpoint precision level so that climbing back up to where they previously were would be as tough a challenge as when they first came up. We felt the player should learn to become more familiar with the mechanic and get better in the process so they can pass through previous sections quicker if they were to go back down. I understand that there were other ways to use explosions as a mechanic for platformers but to not make the design process too extreme (and also fit within our abilities for 7 days), this is what we felt was the best way to utilize the mechanic and build a game around.
Again, thank you for your thoughts, for trying out our game, and to keep expressing your thoughts to developers.