Gotcha, thanks for writing all this out, it'll be good to consider all of this more in the future. Definitely tried to do too many things at once in this level. Playing it back now, with a lot more distance from the active development, I really agree with a lot of the stuff you're saying.
It took a bit longer than I expected due to getting busy IRL, but I did also fix up the stopped dialog and the phantom level as well, so if you should be able to check out the other resolution if you're still interested. Hopefully you enjoy it more.
Thanks for playing!