Thanks for your thoughts. Yes, the game is very RNG-based, and it's meant to be the kind of roguelike game where you shouldn't expect to win every run. But in hindsight perhaps I went too far with it and could have smoothed things over a bit. If I make RNG-based games like this in future I'll think about how to do this.
Viewing post in RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG... too many layers.
Yeah, it feels very roguelike in a lot of those ways, but most popular entries in the genre have weighted RNG more in line with what I suggested, and less extreme scaling as you progress, because of the exact problems with an overly-random (not overly-punishing) early game. Likewise on the stacking of layers, most games try to limit how many steps of RNG will hit the player before their own choices come into the picture again.
Game is still super fun, though!