Great to hear back from you!
It seems your team is heading in the right direction with making the combat and item management easier to manage. Choosing which ability to use and only being able to choose the items to enhance the ability will definitely make the choices less paralyzing. I will be looking forward to the next update.
Yeah, I understand that there are just soo many things to be done with so little time. With RPG type of game, even if we do not have a save/load system, is it possible for your team to provide a cheat-code to skip to certain event/location? That will be super helpful for playtesters to just focus on the things under test. just my two cents!
Cheers!