Thank you so much for taking the time to write such an extensive comment, it really means a lot to us! We're glad you appreciated so many sides of our game, everyone in the team was thrilled to read your review! :)
I understand what you mean, the hook's controls do take a while to get used to, and I think we just got used to it during development, and left it as we thought it was fine, but we have much more experience with it than new players. We want to add a beta test phase into our game jams but we've never managed to, for now ^^'