Fun little experience and once I figured out the significance of pulling the leaves it got a lot more interesting.
I was a little confused from the description at first, thinking that the goal was to use the "Pull Leaf" input as little as possible to maximize my score, but once I tried doing it things made more sense.
The setup of allowing the player to designate when to up their difficulty is really cool, but I'm curious if you had tried using something like an item pickup for the difficulty ramp so that players were forced to move around to get the max score or forced to be "unlucky" because the pickup spawned in the middle of the screen and they couldn't avoid getting it while dodging the current pies?