I would have loved to do walking animations/polis it, but that ended up being pushed further and further back on the to do list, we might add it after the voting period tho!
And yeah, resetting the crane is kinda like cheating but we kept it as a safe measure in case objects get stuck permanently. It is very hard to control what objects do when using physics so we decided to allow for players to "cheat" and feel sneaky about it than possibly punishing them by giving super hard or impossible machines!
Thank you for the comment tho! We want to keep working on it after the jam so hearing this feedback is great!