All good, I figured that might be the case. I feel like I need to put out some sort of PSA for indie devs to avoid this sort of thing, cause this isn't the first time I've run into it lol.
I wound up just starting from scratch, and the silver lining was that I was able to take better notes this time of what to come back to, so that was nice. Just rolled credits! I missed a couple of the tablets, never really pieced together what they were for, so I wanna go back in and do that. I get the impression there might be a True Ending if I do? Anyway, I'll definitely have plenty more to say once I'm fully done with the game, but I wanted to let you know that I stuck with it and I'm glad I did!