This was really fun to read, thank you. Glad you enjoyed all the characters.
And yeah, the flower combination logic was actually something my wife and I went back and forth on a lot. She was actually in favor of allowing the later tiers to combine through root overlap, more like you described. I thought that might make things too easy, but looking back, I think that probably would've been the better call, especially for jam pacing and cutting down rerolls. We also talked about making higher quality matches and minigame performance to increase the likelihood of discovering the rarer flowers, which I still think would've been a fun way to handle it. Funny enough. Omnipotus was meant to be the final flower to get, but because of how the logic ended up working, he was actually easier than intended XD. The third-gen flowers ended up being tougher.
Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback :)
As for the frog, yes, Aristotle longs for his past life of ignorance and innocence.