You don't have to necissarily bin the drifting mechanics. Maybe it is possible to have the drifing take a shorter amout of time before it reaches the direction of input. That is one way, but my complaint was only my opinion.
Absolutely I can. I'd just have to ramp up the acceleration a bit more and then tweak the friction/drag to get a similar speed rate of decay to the drift. Lots of tweaks I could do and I'm glad to hear feedback on it.
I probably won't touch it though, other than to upload the .p8 file to github for easier viewing of the code.