Thanks you feel that way! We have already have tiny emitted particles for each hit as you mentioned on your first sentence but they are very small compared to the drill, which take all the glory itself (selfish drills! That is why I prefer pickaxes in Terraria). But thank you for sharing your ideas, they are great and we had similar ideas that experimented too!
Honestly we could focused more on vfx (also sfx) since it is the heart of the incremental games IMO. Time was not on our side learning how to implement our ideas on scene and most of the time we chose best and fast solutions for them, expecting to return them to upgrade at the free time.
Thanks for playing and sharing detailed ideas I really appreciate!