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Thank you for the reply!! And of course ^^ Here's another wall of text, sorry for that, I tried to be more specific.  I hope this is helpful!

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My issue with the currency system and shops exclusively apply to endless mode & endless mode high scores.

When going for new personal records on endless, the ideal way to play would be to grind for hours on normal mode stocking up on currency.  Then, when you start a new endless run, you can immediately buy whatever you want at the end of every area.  It feels cheap because if you play in this way, the prices of the items don't matter.  You can afford anything as many times as you want depending on how much you're willing to grind beforehand.  This makes endless mode records feel unrewarding (unless you completely avoid the shop altogether), and it renders all the currency you find during the run useless.

My suggestion to fix this is to have a separate currency system for endless, which always starts at 0 when you start a new run.  This way, the currency/oranges you find during the run are actually important to pick up, and every bought item feels earned.  If you did go through with this change, I'd imagine the prices for a lot of these items would need to go waaaay down and tweaked heavily to be balanced.  IMO items should be cleared from your inventory at the start of a new endless run for similar reasons.

It would also be neat if some of the shops were a little different sometimes; it feels a little samey for *every* item to show up with the same price every time.  Maybe only some of the items could show up in each shop (chosen randomly or weighted)? Maybe items can be rarely discounted? I think it'd give the shops more flare and would add a lot of replayability to the mode.

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For the aquatic area, I find that some room layouts can have unsolvable rooms.  (It didn't let me post an image or a link, so see imgur com / a / uIaXbP7)

You can't go around the box to the left (you'll get stuck and die), and you cannot turn around.  You're guaranteed to get hit by the squid pup ahead.  These kinds of room layouts with tight corridors are TOO tight to be consistently passable without damage.  Either the spawning of water enemies needs to be changed, or the room layouts need to be adjusted to be more fair (more space/more options for navigation & dodging).  Better item spawn frequency would help with this too.  

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I also wanted to note issues I had with general game/item balance.

Speed-up items feel strictly bad for the player unless you're going for a fast time.  There's no value from speeding up since the chaser enemies always match your pace and you're more likely to run into traps.  

Juking chaser enemies (turning around and walking through them) is too easy in my opinion, with or without speed items.  Dead-ends in the vent area, for example, are not a threat in any way-- you can just turn around and walk through all the enemies without taking damage.   The only way to fix this is to fundamentally change how they deal damage (maybe with a different difficulty mode), or to change how they follow the player.  I understand that those are both very difficult things to fine tune, so no worries if that isn't a reasonable change to make.  Maybe this new enemy behavior could apply only to the vent area to compromise?

Thrown items in their current state (other than the AOE bottle from the shop) aren't ever going to be worth purchasing over any syringe. There's almost always more than one enemy chasing you, and making distance from enemies doesn't matter; they just rubber-band back to you.  Also, thrown items are seldom helpful for when you get caught in dead-ends.  Using an item slows you down, and the only thing that matters for preventing damage is spending as little time as you can next to enemies.  Basically, it's always better to juke than to use a thrown item, so thrown items feel useless.

I think it's awesome to have a variety in items, and I love some items being stronger than others... But right now, syringes are just way too far exceedingly better than other item types to the point where it's the ONLY item type that actually impacts your game (other than the revive-on-death item of course, which is buuuusted!! ^^)

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Despite all these nitpicks this game is still really fun! It feels good to play, and I love coming back to it to improve my scores.  Thank you and your team so much for maintaining it and listening to feedback! Sorry again, I know this is a LOT of text.  My hope is that some of this is useful to you guys.