Thanks for the great feedback, as usual.
We wanted that final fight to be tougher for the Next Fest demo to show off more of the higher level abilities. We didn't run into the same issue with too much healing. They do have a limit on healing items, though the healer class does have their ability, and that may need to get more limits on how often it can be used. Of course, we know the game, so that likely had an impact, and this is why others playing is so helpful. We will take a look at it with an eye to balancing the healing. We also plan an overhaul of the demo when we next release one, so that whole fight will likely change. Those enemies are meant for a later fight, and you won't normally be getting the Demo Dragon upgrades.
When you select a character in combat their current and max AP is shown at the top center. You can see this in the first screenshot on the game page. It is in a more horizontal 3x3 grid layout, compared to the vertical layout of the character stats screen. We may need to do something to make it more clear what this is. If it is not showing for you, then that would be a bug.
We are thinking on ways to better handle organizing things for the non-Inventory Management mode. In the normal mode the idea had been that you'd leave all the low level or less wanted items in the Party Bag, so they would not crowd the combat screen. Now everything you don't send back for a quest is there, which can make it more crowded. We've been toying with adding a single extra bag for holding items you want to keep, but not see anywhere else. There is also the possibility we could add an attribute to items so the player could simply mark them so that it does not show in combat. Though I think that would need a good UI to not confuse players with why certain items aren't showing if they forget, or did it without realizing. The other thing I want to add is a player selectable filter for the combat item selection, but it needs to be more limited to fit the space. It also needs the right settings for what to retain between selecting items. For example, if you simply decide that you only want higher level items, should that stay for all characters and abilities, or just the current one. Some things like level work well across all abilities. Filtering by Affinity may be specific to the ability. We have not worked out how we want to handle this, so it is still on the todo list. We will be putting more focus on the combat in the near future, so hopefully we can work out a good way to do this during that review.
The basic spit does work well for cleaning up the last HP of enemies. One of the things we wanted in the combat is the decision between using items to do more powerful attacks and taking the enemy out sooner, before they use their items, or loosing the items the enemy uses. With the current version you get a fair amount of items, and the quests don't have any sense of urgency, so it is less needed to hold all items. This means using the lower level ones to finish fights when you need a bit more than item-less spit, can be useful, and not feel as wasteful.
Thanks again for your feedback. Looking forward to your thoughts on the other questions.