Hey thanks for the response, this is all very useful! :)
I definitely agree on a lot of your points regarding gameplay balance (ads didn't really get finished in time tbh, and more was planned but as it stands it is kind of easy-to-win once the gameplay loop makes sense), needing more buppet type/variety, audio loops being a little too short (Agreed that the intro song was more of a banger than the actual gameplay audio loop).
There was a credits screen but it didn't end up in the game until the QoL updates because of some last minute mishaps on my part.
There was a music person and an art person on the team, but the music person ended up doing basically all the art for the game as well as the music due to schedule/skill crunch. Some of the GUI style was handled by the original art person, and so even though I hadn't considered the illustrations clashing with the character art/CRT effect, that makes a lot of sense!
The channel management style games definitely showed up a few times in the games I played, and I hadn't considered that people could have been getting burnt out either, but that probably contributed to some of the more negative ratings as well!
If you played the version with the credits missing, then you may have also been hit by an audio bug that caused weird looping behavior on the main game audio loop... Honestly, I stopped getting feedback on issue reproduction from the only person on the team who was able to reproduce the issue, so it may or may not have been fixed in the last QoL update, but I will keep that in mind as well for the future!
I also agree that with more polish and extra oomph this game could be more than just a game-jam-game™ (although I don't believe there's currently any interest in continuing the project from the rest of the team)
Some of these problems seem probably just boil down to not enough time and not enough experience with Godot and Game Dev, so I'll keep improving there, but the items I hadn't considered do shed some light on what people may have hated most about our game. This is great feedback and I appreciate it a lot!
As a follow up question, if you don't mind me digging a little deeper, which item would you say was the worst offender in terms of quality? I.E. if you only got to choose one item to fix, which would it be? To put it another way - Is it a pretty even spread of badness, or was there a low-hanging fruit that, if tweaked, would have really improved the quality for you? Main audio loop seems like the biggest offender from what I've gathered so far, but gameplay balancing and end of the day score calculations could be significant spots for improvement as well, maybe?
Also, I didn't get a chance to play your game during the jam, but if you want I could probably play it now and try to spot anything that I feel might be blind spots in terms of quality? I can try to offer critical feedback (or just positive compliments if there's nothing major) as a form of thanks for the thought you put into helping me get some extra perspective on my team's game!