Glad to see you are still chipping away at this! I was a bit concerned based on the title of this post that maybe you were considering stepping away.
I'm terrible at balancing (and the game in general, not sure I've ever got more than 5 victories) so I'd mostly leave it to you. I played a bit of the update and it did seem to do a fairly good job of preventing infinite back-and-forths. It did seem a bit difficult to get casts the longer the game went on, which could potentially lead to a different stalling problem? Maybe lowering the initial cast threshold (from 10 to 8) would be an idea? Not sure, like I said I'm awful at balancing.
I would caution you against ingredient quantity creep though. I like the large variety of options on display but feel like with the shop only ever displaying 2 ingredients for exchange, it might be hard to ever see some of them. Maybe adding a permanent upgrade feature that enhances future runs might be cool? One of the upgrades could be shop size or something like that.
More than anything I'm hoping to see more art and effects for the next update, but also understand that is probably one of the harder parts! Thank you for all you're doing on this game, its very enjoyable!