Hi thank you for trying this out and sorry you had a bad experience with it. trust and Obscurity are factored into your overall score. The first prestige disappeared because your score wasn't high enough yet. (Should be a hover hint tooltip on all buttons) anomolies are just buffs and debuffs though sometimes you can't access them if the button they're lighting isn't available. And your prestige purchases absolutely influence your progress, along with a boost to click power based on the difference in your previous high score, although the first one or two aren't super noticeable until you start earning more meta currency with higher scores. I hope you'll give it another try, get the auto clicker going and check back in a day for all that offline gain. You aren't daft, this is my first game and I've a lot to learn.
Thank you, I'm definitely going to try and add something that clears it up a bit. I think i got jaded a bit because I spent so much time with it that it makes sense to me even though it's quite abstract. There is definitely some story/lore that goes along with it but I felt it was a bit out of my scope to try and squeeze it in before the jam deadline.