Thank you so much for the comment!
Really glad to hear about the parts you enjoyed! Also you are totally right about the difficulty curve of the game. Basically I have a curated set of attack patterns that randomly get spawned. While additional tougher waves do get spawned after getting 2 modifiers, maybe I should have had a easier set for the time before any modifiers. As it stands now the difficulty curve is definitely weird, with one of the hardest parts being right at the start, and probably getting noticeably easier after the first modifier when it should be the opposite instead! But curating such sets, perfecting the rotation time etc. are things that take a lot of time to create, playtest and balance. Working alone, I don't think that level of polish can reasonably be expected in a 7 day game jam, but maybe that's a skill issue :)
One area where I will disagree is, you mentioned that the feeling of dying not being your fault is a bad thing for a game to have. But I see it as a natural consequence of the genre of game. With roguelikes having random generation and permadeath, the chances of feeling that your of death was unfair, is sort of always there. It can definitely be mitigated through tuning, but like I said it was hard to do in this game, given the 7 day time. Also such instances are naturally there more often when you start playing, but reduce as you rack up more runs and gain more skill. And later as you get familiar with the exact mechanics, you get to know what works and what doesn't and once you know that, it gets harder to blame the game, and not yourself. Also games of a similar nature that generate similar emotions do go on to become very popular. Examples could be, Enter the Gungeon, Don't Starve, Downwell, Getting over it and maybe Hotline Miami. It's all a matter of execution, which obviously would be poor for a jam game quickly scrapped together :)
Happy discuss this further if you want to...